ALIX EARLE’S AGE IS REFERENCED REPEATEDLY on her new Netflix reality series Earle Meets World, a show clearly constructed according to the doctrine of Kardashianpolitik, down to the production company and our parent-manager cares more about the lucrative sister arc. Observations that Earle is “doing all the things she’s doing at 25 years old” or “not like a normal 25-year-old” are usually made in close proximity to scenes where Earle’s younger sister and dubiously employed friends are, alternately, going out or laying around after having gone out. (In a transparent attempt to hook my older readers: Earle’s stepmother Ashley was one of the women involved in the 2008 Eliot Spitzer scandal.)

Earle’s abnormality becomes a consistent theme in the debut season. While the gals are gallivanting around a battery of Manhattan’s most overdetermined venues (a bar where you can play pingpong; a bar with trash-can-sized beer pong), Earle is herself gamely pingponging between coastal corners of the US for televised work obligations, an unholy number of which seem to be, inexplicably, courtesy of Dunkin’ Donuts. A separate television crew, provided by Netflix, dutifully trails her to each of these locales, its cameras capturing footage of other cameras capturing footage. She is portrayed as a dedicated, relentless wunderkind, sacrificing her youth in service of DoorDash product placement and Dancing with the Stars and cover shoots for magazines named after materials like PAPER and NYLON, as It Girls are wont to do.

This sentiment is reiterated with such matter-of-fact regularity that it took me until the sixth episode to remember that the vast majority of 25-year-old Americans also spend most of their time working, not playing arcade games in honky-tonk-themed speakeasies. Roughly half are already responsible for young children.1 What narrative purpose did it serve, I wondered, to make so much of Earle’s age and schedule?

Insisting that the abnormal thing about Earle’s life is the age at which she’s “doing all these things”—rather than her estimated $24 million2 in annual income derived from, mostly, documenting herself partying and promoting various products between said partying gigs—strikes me as a savvy obfuscation. It’s at once a rebuttal and preemptive strike against the sort of commentary that scenes of a family of seven (plus entourage) traveling via private jet to Aspen for a weekend music festival might otherwise provoke. The series does not try to avoid the unavoidable fact of her utterly unique lifestyle, but merely locates the source of that uniqueness in her supposedly unusual decision to prioritize her career at 25.

Obligatory comparisons to the imperial sprawl of the Kardashian empire—a veritable multi-decade and multidimensional consumer juggernaut—spawn primarily from the shared allegation that each family is famous for being famous. But the early seasons of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, which premiered in 2007, were perfectly happy to present the golden, palm-tree-lined privilege of mid-aughts Calabasas without any such couching in the language of deservingness or hustle. Kim made a sex tape. Ryan Seacrest and Kris Jenner hatched a plan. The irony is that now we know just how calculated—how (assessed with moral neutrality) truly singular—Kris Jenner’s management and manipulation of her family’s fame really was, but at the time, the sisters did not seem engaged in such an explicit public relations effort.

The repeated emphasis on Earle’s schedule and work ethic reminded me of the theme pulsing beneath the dimly lit personal training sessions and frantic quick-changes depicted in The End of an Era, the 2025 six-part Eras Tour docuseries that I watched in a rapture of weepy credulity like the ideologically inconsistent voyeur I am. In his breakdown of the series, preeminent “Swiftologist” Zachary Hourihane describes the accretive significance of these snapshots:

“Taken together, these episodes aim to build a particular case, that Taylor Swift is not a greedy, hollow, girlboss billionaire stomping around the world in her private jet, draining cities dry so she can buy another mansion. She is a hard-working, almost pathologically professional woman, who has built this thing from the purest possible intention: love of the craft, love of the fans, love of work.”

Sounds about right to me, I say, tugging at the collar of my Eras Tour sweatshirt, which I am, hand to heart, wearing as I write this. Notably, Swift and Earle are both beneficiaries of sharky dadagers, their forays into entertainment helmed by a patriarch who shrewdly converted his daughter’s fame into a family affair.

This recurring throughline in popular media—that which is designed to supply an ostensible “behind-the-curtain” glimpse at female objects of cultural fascination—is notable to me because it seems obviously in conversation with a broader shift in the zeitgeist, evidence intended to refute an amalgam of both legitimate class antagonism and subconscious misogyny that says the gains of any woman rich and famous enough to command her own reality docuseries must be, in some way, ill-begotten.

I suppose you could argue that the grunting, expletive-heavy reality shows that center highly compensated professional (male) athletes—Quarterback, Hard Knocks—perform a similar legitimizing function, though these series appear to do so without the defensive crouch. (Elite athleticism is its own indisputable proof of deservingness; it doesn’t require as much narrativizing.) In fact, fans of Hard Knocks may know Earle, too: Her ex-boyfriend plays in the NFL, and she made her television debut in the role of WAG in the Miami Dolphins season.

But in Earle Meets World, Earle’s primary role is as a stand-in for the market itself, a proxy for aggregate demand. This is the sort of observation that’s insufferably “capitalism blogger”-coded, but I struggle to explain the sensation I had while watching in any other terms. Earle manages to be both a shiny surface and inscrutable black hole, absorbing and reflecting the desires of The Audience. The empty, fractured storylines plastered against a backdrop of excessive wealth are somehow both a letdown and the show’s chief selling point. As Alison Herman’s review for Variety puts it, Earle’s broad appeal is not that she is “particularly funny, opinionated, or inventive,” but that she is “a wealthier and more conventionally attractive version of the average consumer.” In many scenes, we are invited to be entertained by their deliberations about what we will find entertaining; to enjoy the marketing strategy sessions where they determine how best to market to us. The subject matter may be lowbrow, but the show is bizarrely high-concept in this regard. We are, in other words, watching content about a woman making content, and as everyone knows by now, the primary economic utility of content is to make a sale. The viewer is partaking in a sort of circular infomercial for Alix Earle, a woman who is entirely beholden to us, The Audience; whose job (at which we are assured she works very hard!) is to be whoever we want her to be.

Maybe that’s why my experience of dry-swallowing all eight episodes in the 24 hours following their release was so strange. As I watched, a distracting and frustrated metacommentary chattered away in my head, and yet now I am left only with a vaguely pleasant impression of the Earles, a hazy sense that I’ve gotten to know them. Have I? Stranger still is the fact that I can hardly remember a single event responsible for my new, nonspecific affinity; can’t point to any one scene that consciously endeared them to me. Attempts to do so feel like groping for fragments of a dream.

It was only after a few days that I understood the product I had been sold was not the Dunkin’ Donuts Earle-y Riser Meal or even Earle’s own skincare line Reale Actives, but a particular vision of Earle as a sympathetic, authentic, and worthy pitchwoman. The effort was, largely, successful, a fact made counterintuitive when you consider that there are entire episodes which contradict swaths of her TikTok persona, as when we see the frenzied and protracted behind-the-scenes damage control of a situation that she treated with dismissive humor online.

A television show about an influencer sure makes it easy to reach for Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “simulacra,” or the representation of a thing that no longer refers to an actual, underlying reality. And it’s true that there are surreally self-referential scenes which depict discussions about what, precisely, they’re going to cop to on the very reality show we are, at present, watching. But this is not a new tendency in entertainment, just a spinoff befitting the panopticon age. “Television shows about the business of television shows were rare for a long time,” David Foster Wallace writes in “E Unibus Pluram,” his famous 1993 essay about television. “The Dick Van Dyke Show was prescient, and Mary Moore carried its insight into her own decade-long exploration of local-market angst. Now, of course, there’s been everything from Murphy Brown to Max Headroom to Entertainment Tonight.”

Wallace was writing almost a decade and a half before the first season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians and 30 years before Alix Earle would explode on TikTok. But where early seasons of Keeping Up were about people who were famous for being famous, Earle Meets World seems to cut out the middleman, instead documenting the tedious maintenance of fame for fame’s sake. “Earle and her family seem almost paralyzed by their luck,” Allie Jones writes in The Cut. “They know they have a golden ticket, but they’re not quite sure what to do with it.” The most straightforward moment of Earle Meets World, then, occurs in the very first episode, in an interview with Earle’s nine-year-old brother Thomas. When asked why the family is doing a reality show at all, he deadpans to a roar of fourth-wall-breaking laughter from the crew: “So they can make profit.”

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• My favorite tribute to Gloria Steinem was Rebecca Traister’s. It did a good job of capturing the complexity of legacy and lionization. (The Cut)

• Also worthwhile: This short interview about Steinem with Angela Davis. (NPR)

• Nathan Fielder made a secret documentary about America’s Girlboss Elizabeth Holmes with A24. (!) (Variety)

• Wake up, babe, there’s a new Daniel Kolitz essay about payday loan apps. Kolitz—of “Goon Squad” fame—is, for me, one of the truly great essayists of our time. Here’s an unjustifiably lengthy teaser, because it is sensational and the exact type of financial writing I’ve come to love most:

And, just in time, a few new friends came to the rescue: Albert, Cleo, Brigit, and Dave.

Such beautiful names. Let’s hear them again. Albert. Cleo. Brigit. Dave. They are—one hesitates to say it, before plunging right ahead—winsome. Each belongs to a personal finance app launched between 2016 and 2019, at the dawn of the VC-backed fintech rush. Each offers a variety of personal finance tools (mostly glorified budget planners) but is built at its core around short-term, small-dollar, high-interest loans. You sign up and grant them access to your banking history, and their automated underwriting tools make an offer, typically between $25 and $500, with a repayment window of seven to fourteen days. If you’re wondering why they’re all named like people, you can find plenty of answers in the pay-for-play business press that once bankrolled my existence. Dave CEO Jason Wilk, for instance, told eMarketer, “We wanted something approachable and friendly,” something that would distinguish their finance app from the “unapproachable” banks, with their “big, fancy names.” It’s true that I know at least four guys named Dave and none named Bank of America. At the same time, not one of the Daves I know—nor even Bank of America—has tried to saddle me with a 400 percent APR on a two-figure loan.

[…] In interviews, these apps’ founders paint their prototypical user as a broke college kid, someone who might need financial guidance and a little extra walking-around money every now and then. In truth, as they and their many high-profile investors know, broke people exist at every stage of life, and many are more than happy to accept what these apps are offering, which they call “cash advances” and which their critics call “payday loans.” (The Baffler)

• It has come to my unconsenting attention that a Republican senator has taken to calling the educated, downwardly mobile millennial members of the Democratic Socialists of America “Lulu Lenins.” Regrettably this is one of the funniest epithets I’ve ever heard and as a result there’s no choice but to grudgingly embrace it. (The Atlantic)

• Relatedly, I have a page of notes about the whole “Woke 1 vs. Woke 2” discourse following the Economist op-ed called “Woke 1 was about identity. Woke 2 is about class.” It remains to be seen whether the disparate observations are going to cohere into anything insightful. In the meantime, here’s a collage of my favorite things that Fox News has called “woke” at some point in the last five years:

See you next time.

Money with Katie is a promoter of Domain, a real client, and receives compensation in connection with sponsorship of the podcast and newsletter. This compensation creates a conflict of interest because it may influence the content presented, including the featuring of Domain Money or its advisors. The views expressed by the promoter are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Domain Money. This communication is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as a recommendation, offer, or solicitation for the purchase or sale of any security. All financial planning and investment strategies should be tailored to the unique circumstances and objectives of each client. All testimonials are from current clients of Domain Money Advisors, LLC (Domain). No compensation (non-cash or otherwise) was provided in exchange for these testimonials. Domain does not have any material conflict of interest with the persons giving these testimonials. *Names have been modified to protect anonymity.

THE UNITED STATES has a financial literacy crisis, or so I am told.

Despite the vast and accelerating quantities of educational material produced in the US over the last few decades, the number of Americans deemed “financially literate” has remained stubbornly constant: roughly half, a judgment derived from a series of questions about things like calculating the interest earned in a savings account and the risks associated with buying a single stock.

The sentiment goes down easily, in part, because generally speaking Americans appear to be struggling economically, a related but separate fact often conflated in the popular imagination with all those low test scores. There’s a loosely threaded daisy chain of logic connecting financial literacy rates to financial outcomes: Those with a “very low level of financial literacy” are “2x more likely to be debt-constrained,” one recent (and breathlessly covered) TIAA report highlights, for example, and “2.5x more likely to spend 10 hours or more per week thinking about and dealing with issues and problems related to personal finances.” The relationship between the low level of literacy and the debt and/or time crunches is assumed causal, linear: more financial literacy, better financial outcomes.

Doubtless there’s validity to the idea that some percentage of financial wounds are self-inflicted via blunt-force boneheadedness, though in order for this theory of Americans’ slowly deteriorating financial conditions1 to remain convincing, you have to basically shunt off the reality of our information technology environment: There’s never been more financial instruction available. It’s never been easier to get an immediate answer to an obscure question.

Still, central to the ethos of the “financial literacy crisis” is the belief that information—which is to say, the knowledge that a particular financial decision is stupid—is the most effective antidote. This can lead some pundits to the conclusion that the answer to both the weak test scores and the growing precarity is heaping on even more financial literacy, as in this quote given to the Times about the latest results, which show scores at a 10-year low: “It makes an even stronger case for financial education.” You’re likely to hear, in the middle of this wind-up, that we don’t learn these things in school. (More than 30 states now require a financial literacy course to graduate from high school, though implementation is only complete in 11 of them.) The United States produces more of this material than any other society in the history of the world, and yet, you can scarcely open a newspaper without encountering some glowing, amnesic interview with a person who has set out to “teach people about money,” as though this is the first time anyone has ever thought to do such a thing.2

None of this is to say that education is bad or wrong or should be avoided—just that there’s something that feels a little disingenuous about the latest round of urgent calls for More Education. This is at least in part because the research on the efficacy of financial literacy has been mixed for a long time, and by mixed, I mean it’s not unusual for the regression analyses found in the very papers arguing for more financial literacy to clearly demonstrate that other factors, like income,3 are almost laughably more impactful than how proficiently someone can answer a question about inflation. The differences in the finances of the top and bottom scorers are often of degree, not kind. For example, despite the topline takeaway that bottom scorers are “2x more likely to be debt-constrained,” 70% of those who scored nearly perfectly on the 28-question P-Fin Index also reported being in debt, a mere five-point drop from those who scored the lowest on the test.

What is maybe the most widely cited research on the subject comes from Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia S. Mitchell, who found in a 2014 working paper that “financial literacy alone can explain more than half the observed wealth inequality.” But their study relied on models comparing the wealth-to-income ratios of simulated groups, rather than an analysis of real-world wealth and income, and assumed the savings of the more financially literate group would yield higher returns. There’s probably some legitimacy to these assumptions, but the simple math of compounding guaranteed from the outset that the group granted a higher fictional return on their fictional investments would end up with more fictional money, gains which were assumed to flow to the financially literate based on their knowledge alone. In the final version of the paper published in 2017, Lusardi, Mitchell, and a third coauthor, Michaud, revised this estimate downward, updating the claim to apply specifically to retirement wealth inequality, and modulating their estimate of “more than half” to between 30–40%. Which is to say: Even in the clean confines of a financial simulation where there’s a straight line between knowledge and returns, 60–70% of wealth inequality in retirement is not explained by financial literacy.

It’s at this point that we skeptics could begin to pull threads in any number of worthwhile directions. We could theorize, flanked by solid evidence, that in fact income is the most reliable determinant of outcomes. We could tee up an argument about how financial literacy is no match for the actuaries at that shadowy organized crime syndicate State Farm Group who have determined, again, that your premium will rise by 20% this year, or for the median $2,623 (principal-and-interest-only) mortgage payment. But life has always been challenging and expensive, you might object, and we need a foundation that can help us navigate these realities. Fair enough.

What strikes me as most worthy of discussion, then, is not that personal finance education tends to fail as a solution to low wages or swelling fixed costs, but that it also tends to fall short on its own terms, as the chief difference-maker4 in the outcomes that are ostensibly most responsive to our behavior.

External factors held equal, it seems to me that those who typically build the most robust financial fortresses—the biggest emergency funds, the satiated retirement accounts, the lowest credit card bills—are often not those with the most technical proficiency, but those who possess a few totally unrelated characteristics. For this countercultural group, it’s as though whatever little consumer pulse throbs longingly inside most of us, tugging us around by the soft underbelly of our desire, is demagnetized, defective. They don’t respond to the same stimuli, and as such often express confusion about why everyone else’s Discover statements are so high. It is not knowledge but disposition that seems to make the most meaningful difference. They seem curiously immune to whole swaths of American culture.

Writing from his cell after Mussolini threw him in prison, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci developed his theory of cultural hegemony, or social structures that naturalize ideas and norms largely benefiting the super-minority ruling class of a society, consolidating consent for an order that would otherwise be recognizable as Not In Your Best Interest. You have cultural hegemony to thank for everything from beauty standards to corporate fast food to the ubiquity of lobotomizing television programs; in other words, concepts that might otherwise trigger your objection in a vacuum but which have become Common Sense elements of an average life.5

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And now, back to the essay:

American cultural hegemony has a distinct throughline. Our entertainment tends to favor and amplify displays of affluence. Advertising trains us to communicate status and success through products. Cosmetic and sartorial choices are variations on that same theme; what looks “good” is often synonymous with what looks expensive. (Raise all of this to the exponent of a fetishized work ethic that says wealth and success are themselves evidence of moral uprightness.) That these inclinations are ultimately internalized such that the desire for cashmere cardigan sets and granite countertops seems to spring from the sacred depths of your personhood is exactly how the whole thing is designed to work; it is powerful only because the desire feels well and truly yours, such that denying it feels like denying yourself.

Far from being a bulwark against this culture, financial literacy is itself part of this same superstructure, a pillar that mostly exists to reinforce the idea that there’s a responsible and correct way to engage with all this naked wanting. It’s less a countervailing force than a legitimizing one. Here’s how to manage the complicated debt products you’re using to buy and furnish your home, here’s how to calculate the maximum car payment you can afford after your trade-in, here’s how to protect yourself from a needless layoff.6

All of it accrues to the implicit suggestion that such complexity is reasonable, even necessary; that knowledge is in fact a perfectly appropriate and not at all anemic response to an abstruse financial ecosystem designed to separate you from as much of your money as our weakened consumer protections will allow. Complexity is incentivized and therefore continually increases, and like clockwork, the calls for additional knowledge—not, you’ll notice, simplicity—ramp up, existing material now deemed too “basic” or “out of date.” It’s a never-ending arms race, so the “literacy” process can never really end, because the profit motive demands that the system continue evolving beyond your understanding. Americans who buy a home not knowing their mortgage payment can keep going up forever or that they’ll need to allot tens of thousands of extra dollars for opaque fees to secure their loan, for example, aren’t “failing at financial literacy” so much as they are ignorant in the precise ways the system7 intended.

And so I posit that those practical traits which often make someone “good with money” in a sturdy, enduring way are those that have little to do with financial proficiency at all: traits like resourcefulness, a baseline state that trends toward contentment, being generally less suggestible to the logic and spectacle of marketing. Folks with these characteristics tend to have largely inexpensive hobbies and don’t mind—or maybe outright enjoy—the sort of monotonous labor required to maintain a life.

My brother-in-law is a surgeon. He is congenitally frugal. I have no idea how much money he makes, but practical decisions appear to come easily to him: the unfussy car, a borderline-spiritual opposition to silly little beverages, exclusively home-cooked meals made from store-brand ingredients sourced from a discounted bulk retailer. He is the only member of our family with an Android, a choice that I assume he made after a sober cost-benefit analysis, despite our merciless taunting about his green texts. As far as I can tell, none of this abstention strains him. He’s not making “sacrifices” or constantly battling back unruly compulsions. Preserving his resources appears to be the natural byproduct of the way he moves through life, not an exercise in conscious willpower.8

I feel confident that if he had never encountered a single word of personal finance advice, he’d be in a similar financial position. There are other people like this in my life; those preternaturally averse to waste, uncompelled by the middle-school-inflected norms that say it’s embarrassing to wear the same clothes over and over. It’s not that they’re better at actively resisting the clarion call of Friday night takeout or the Saturday afternoon shopping, it’s that they don’t seem to feel the tug to begin with.

Anyone who knows this type of person knows these tendencies can tip into an unnecessary and irrational narrowing of possibility, but more often than not their lives just seem to contain less static. I’m envious of this disposition. I’ve always, shamefully, been susceptible to status symbols and shortcuts. I don’t know what this says about the frailty of my ego but I’m sure it isn’t flattering. The success of my ultra-frugal years was the result of an effortful and focused channeling of this monastic identity, but the moment I earned enough to unlace the fiscal corset without nuking my financial future, I was again skipping around Neiman Marcus, topless and free.

The cyclical calls for more financial literacy, then, are a bit of a red herring. That doesn’t mean it’s a conspiracy. It’s hard to imagine people like Lusardi and Mitchell maniacally rubbing their hands together, plotting all the ways their quizzes about revolving lines of credit will distract the indebted masses from recognizing their shared interest in toppling Big Credit Card, busying themselves instead with payoff calculators and the envelope method. Rather than the reeducation arm of United Health Group, it’s just the (mostly) ineffectual weapon we dole out for the grand perpetual battle with American culture and its attendant financial system, not unlike entering the Colosseum armed with a Crazy Straw.

The personality type most adept at reasonably navigating a globalized, financialized economy, then, is the one least titillated by all the stuff engineered specifically to titillate—which is to say that there technically is an individual solution to some of these systemic realities, and it has virtually nothing to do with personal finance. Unfortunately, these are not traits that can be easily taught to high schoolers. Some people, for whatever reason, develop antibodies to the cultural principles the rest of us dutifully internalize, then reproduce and export.

In my experience these folks tend to feel a little superior about all of this. They mostly deserve to.

• I hung on every word of this surrogacy feature. The way your sense of who’s the villain and who’s the victim keeps shifting throughout kept me locked in. (The Cut)

• Unfortunately, I also want this rich woman’s divorce memoir. Commenters bemoaning that the Journal’s highlighting of the absurdity of hedge fund wealth will “inform a lot of recruiting commercials for the DSA” had me giggling and kicking my feet. (Wall Street Journal)

• Randomly stumbled across this piece of media criticism from 2020 called “This Brand is Late Capitalism” that I had to read through my hands because I feared it was going to incinerate my entire intellectual project. Fortunately I think I’ve only crept close to committing this apparent faux pas once, with my 2025 essay “The Venture Capitalization of Culture.” In my (unwarranted) defense, that essay was more about how the only true “innovation” wrought by the 2010s DTC brands was the inescapability of subscription-style pricing, but it certainly had the same mouthfeel, Sweetgreen references and all. Time to revisit this one? (The Baffler)

IT IS NOT NEWS THAT PEOPLE BEHAVE PUNITIVELY ON THE INTERNET. As longtime readers will know, I once cataloged with great fascination the vindictive compulsions on display in the Wall Street Journal comments section.

The Journal is an outlet whose target audience is mostly upper-middle-class suburban empty nesters, so it’s expected, natural even, that they say things like Gen Z is Struggling to Grow Up, or that Mom and Dad Are a Little Too Involved in Gen Z’s Jobs, or that (bear with me) The Young MAGA Socialists Are Here. I don’t need to read any of these articles—or their comments—to catch the subtext. It’s rarely charitable.

Of course, parents raising kids in the 1950s complained their children were Going Soft now that life was all sockhops and soda pop and washing machines. That these anxieties are exorcised in the comments sections of articles like STUDY FINDS GEN Z ACTUALLY UNEMPLOYED OVERSIZED BABIES is merely the circle of life.1

Less explicable, though, is a variation of this same attitude on Gen Z’s home turf. This much-fretted-over populace, the multicultural, tooth-gemmed Youth2, is indigenous to TikTok. They are the supposed purveyors of trigger warnings and land acknowledgments and socialist politics. It seems noteworthy, then, that TikTok’s algorithmically mediated hive mind regularly swarms conclusions that vary so little from that of the Journalers. If you squint, these digital third spaces appear to be merging into one big contemptuous singularity of get a job and stop asking for handouts.

A few days ago, Matt Bernstein covered one such recent case of manufactured outrage on his podcast A Bit Fruity. At the center of the controversy was a creator named Jools Lebron, who you may know from her “very demure, very mindful” viral rocket ship a few years ago, a video she posted while on break at her job as a grocery store cashier.

To go from a private person to a public figure in mere days—your likeness carpet bombed all over the For You page according to the whims of a proprietary recommendation engine—has to be destabilizing.

Lebron had a (now-somewhat predictable) trajectory: working-class person goes viral unexpectedly, is overwhelmed with a barrage of seemingly life-changing opportunities, then the circus picks up and moves towns. Their 15 minutes are up. A minority3 of people manage to transmute this surreal experience into a sustainable career in entertainment, but sustainability is largely at odds with how virality is designed to operate, where something becomes virtually inescapable and then, just as quickly, vanishes. (Remember Hawk Tuah? Me neither.)

Lebron has been “going viral” again, but this time, not in a way that ushers in partnerships with Dunkin’ Donuts or spawns clumsy tweets from airlines trying to siphon off a little clout juice. After recovering from drug addiction, she says in a now-deleted video, her teeth were “falling out of her head.” Because this is America, the reconstruction surgery she needed cost tens of thousands of dollars, which she did not have. She shared a GoFundMe, asking her followers for help.

The consensus was, apparently, that this request was an unthinkable affront.

Most of the A Bit Fruity coverage focused on clarifying the volatile creator business—the scourge of net-60 payment terms, the instability of freelance income and the complexity of taxes—but it was the collection of sample clips Bernstein shared at the top of the episode summarizing the public response that felt most reminiscent of a good ol’ romp in the Journal comments:

“Asking your 2.4 million followers to help you get new teeth is wild to me.”

“I think I’m really starting to hate influencers, because what do you mean you have over 2 million followers and you’re begging for donations to get your teeth fixed? Get to work. Get to work. All that screams to me is laziness.”

“You want us to pay $40,000 for you to keep your fucking reality alive?”

Videos of this nature, as Bernstein and his guests pointed out, were regenerating at an unbelievable clip, some collecting hundreds of thousands of likes. Each example Bernstein included came from a person who looked no older than 30. As is tradition, some videos took a broader tack, suggesting that, actually, Jools Lebron has ALWAYS been a bad person, as though asking for help to afford healthcare was the last straw, the smoking gun. We got her, folks.

I won’t pretend to be surprised by this reaction. The backlash comes amid a broader cultural renegotiation with influencers; a debate about whether it’s a real job; a collective scoff at the vacuous claim that influencers are discriminated against; a suspicion that they’re all just doing ragebait.

But more relevant to the fallout is, I think, the fact that Lebron is asking for help at a time when a lot of people who aren’t internet-famous need help, too. The ACA marketplace enrolled three million fewer people in 2026 following the expiration of tax credits that offset premium costs. These are often the Americans whose jobs don’t provide healthcare, but who aren’t poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. Too rich for the “free” program, too broke for “premium” insurance. That’s not to say having health insurance would have mattered in this situation; your teeth are, of course, not considered part of your otherwise-insured body.

A quick scroll through these missives and the chatter pooling around them reveals that many feel her primary offense was not “capitalizing on demure” when she had the chance. The anger seemed aimed not just at the perception of her relative financial privilege, but at her inability to convert her internet fame into more privilege—that she, in other words, blew it.

It’s not just the ambient precarity of American life, then, but the specter of vast opportunity that appears to exist simultaneously—that magic portal in your pocket theoretically capable of bibbidi-bobbidi-booing your stagnant paycheck-to-paycheck life—that waters the long-ago-planted seeds of a neoliberalized work ethic.

SO IMAGINE: There you are, scrolling away your lunch break at your middle-income job, and what should appear on your screen but a content creator—someone who gets paid to use the app you use for leisure—asking for money to afford dental surgery. How dare you? you might think, You need to get a job like everyone else.

You’d probably forget, as you scanned the incensed comments suggesting Lebron go back to the grocery store, that even the average white-collar nine-to-five job would not be able to pay for a $40,000 medical bill, since the average income in the United States is around $70,000 before taxes, or around $55,000 after.4

You probably wouldn’t be reflecting on the bleak fact that a reported 10 million Americans have, at some point, engaged in dental tourism, finding it preferable to go to another country for dentistry, particularly because most dental insurance plans stop paying after around $2,000 in expenses per year.

You’d probably hear the chorus of comment cops sounding off about how she should’ve been more financially literate with her demure lottery winnings and find yourself nodding along, agreeing that, had it been you, you surely would’ve capitalized by shilling a Very Demure, Very Mindful eyeshadow palette.

After all this, you might even start to understand where one Kimberly Noel Kardashian was coming from a few years ago when she stared down the barrel of that long lens camera and declared you needed to get your fucking ass up and work because it seems like nobody wants to work these days, an assertion for which she was burned at the stake back in the gentler pandemic haze of 2022.

You might just think—sorry, what was it that one gal said?—Get to work. Get to work. All that screams to me is laziness.

Now you’d be really nice and worked up at the audacity, and it’s at this point that you’d notice the room had been spinning the entire time, signaling that we’ve officially done a 180 on our journey that began with being pissed at Kim about Get Your Ass Up and Work, all that business along the way about class consciousness and structural insecurity and mutual aid sucked clean out the open window by the tornado of reactionary economic politics. Never mind that Jools Lebron, a fat and trans woman of color from a low-income background, is practically a composite sketch of the marginalized identities that received approximately four years of semi-earnest attention in workplace sensitivity trainings before being command-F-deleted from federally funded research databases. None of that shallow sympathy ends up mattering when the person in question appears to fumble the rare opportunity to escape the “rat race,” and then has the gall to ask for help.

Lebron opened an algorithmic candy bar, found a golden ticket inside, and still ended up begging for money on the internet to pay for a major health procedure. This isn’t supposed to happen to someone who “makes it.” And if it can happen to her, that small voice buried beneath all those years of get to work programming might whisper, what’s to stop it from happening to you, too?

And it’s true: We don’t know if Lebron would still be in this position had she made all the “right” decisions back when the ByteDance gods smiled upon her. But we do know that rates of poverty in the US are “unexpectedly high” for “those who ‘play by the rules,’” according to 2023 research, and that while the US has below-average incidence rates of poverty “risk factors” (the so-called wrong decisions) like unemployment and low education, it also has an above-average poverty rate.

This is, when I step back, maybe the clearest proof in recent memory that a punitive demand for individual Accountability^TM from the comparatively privileged (Lebron, in this case; considered a rich person who mismanaged her money) is a distraction, the shared wet dream of billionaires and the lawmakers who refuse to do anything about them. It’s certainly a far less effective driver of solidarity than a recognition of our shared class interests, our shared fallibility, our shared human bodies that break down in new and inventive ways every day.

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Betterment recently released its annual Retail Investor report, and while there was a lot that probably wouldn’t surprise you—concerns about inflation, a lack of confidence about retirement, etc.—there was one actionable finding that I want to highlight.

Routine and structure can create momentum in a positive direction. Investors who use a digital investing platform report retirement confidence at 68%, compared to just 39% for those who don’t—a nearly 30-point gap that I don’t think is explainable by selection bias alone.

Based on Betterment-sponsored survey as of 4/3/2026.

Moreover, the survey found that investors who report the most retirement confidence have a set of financial habits and have designed an intentional structure for their money—for example, investors who use digital investing platforms consistently report higher financial awareness.

I wrote more about my thoughts on the report, as well as the current state of my own financial structure and routine, including what parts I do—and don’t—automate, here.

If you’re looking to build that kind of structure for yourself, get started in minutes with Betterment.

• One word: Bobby.

• Oura Ring users are suing the company for misrepresenting the accuracy of its sleep data tracking. I started using an Oura Ring in 2020 because back then there wasn’t much to do beyond collect biometrics on yourself like a sad little lab rat, but now I’m feeling like a guinea pig. “A coin flip’s chance of being accurate”? My ass got played (if true), though my husband Thomas says he thinks this lawsuit sounds like a cash grab. Either way, it feels like the pendulum is swinging on optimization culture. Is there a thinkpiece there? (TechCrunch)

• Watched the original Jackass: The Movie (2002) for the first time over the weekend. I’m so happy they made 12 of these. What cinema!

• A 34-year-old Denver woman named Heather Walker invited strangers, via handmade posters, to bear witness to her first time roller-skating. It turned into a massive party. You really can just do stuff. (Westword)

• Americans are zooted out of their minds on energy drinks, regularly using all manner of stimulants not for pleasure, but for work. I’d never reflected before on how dark this habit is. (Current Affairs)

• The radio in my car somehow ended up on a Christian rap station. The tagline promises that it’s IGNITING THE KINGDOM LIFE INSIDE OF [ME]. And you know what? Fair. Talk about an email job anthem:

God gave me the keys so I’m lockin’ in,

Had to get off TikTok, watch how I be clockin’ in

Felt the Holy Spirit on the stage when I was walkin’ in

If you got a problem with me, you gon’ have to talk to Him

• An episode about doing donuts in the parking lot of injustice for 40 years; also known as, motherhood’s shifting PR strategy. A public episode of Diabolical Lies:

Diabolical Lies

Nara Smith & the Great Tradwife Exodus

Listen now

20 days ago · 154 likes · 51 comments · Katie Gatti Tassin and caro claire burke

• Sometimes you need to declare print magazine bankruptcy, accept you’ll never catch up with the issues you’ve been accumulating, and recycle the backlog. This is what being brave enough to accept failure looks like:

IN THE YEARS BEFORE THE PANDEMIC, I made a 25-minute journey across Dallas every morning. Early in this commuting tenure I developed the habit of beginning my day with a then-brand-new New York Times podcast called “The Daily,” a show that was—coincidentally to me at the time—also about 25 minutes long.1 In the years since, it has achieved a level of popularity that consistently earns it the #1 spot on the Apple Podcasts app, a rarefied position usually reserved for shows about the gruesome unsolved murders of hot young women. Each of its five weekday episodes reportedly receives millions of downloads.

The genius of the show’s conceit is that it keeps all the analysis controlled within the Times ecosystem: One Times journalist (in 2017, it was still exclusively Michael Barbaro, with his trademark staccato delivery) interviews another about some breaking story. A good format is invisible, and it took me many hours of listening to notice the magic of the show’s engineering, in which the “interview”—and the information being dispensed by it—is staged to unfold in a predetermined way toward a particular set of conclusions, all while feeling casual and spontaneous. It’s well done.

To a politically and economically uneducated nine-to-fiver like me with very little time to read or think about the news, the show felt like eavesdropping on a smart, well-structured conversation conducted in The Room Where It Happens. Instead of merely glossing over the news (they’ve since added a podcast called “The Headlines” which ostensibly does just that), “The Daily” concerns itself with what some big story means; how we should think about and contextualize it.

My “Daily” habit died with my commute, but for years it was my trusted lens on the biggest story of the day. Though as I became more interested in media analysis, I often found myself side-eyeing framing choices when I would tune in, the way the subjective analysis blended so seamlessly with the reporting. I wouldn’t have classified its lens as explicitly ideological when I listened religiously almost a decade ago, albeit maybe blandly “liberal,” in that they didn’t outright scoff at ideas like pronouns and Black Lives Matter protests.2 But in a country that’s as profoundly small-c conservative as the United States, corporate media—even of the liberal variety—tends to skew conservative in its analysis, too, especially when it comes to economic issues.

LAST WEEK, “The Daily” produced an episode about two recent Democratic primaries in traditionally purple states with guest Nate Cohn, the paper’s “chief political analyst.” The episode’s title—“Are the Democratic Socialists Winning or Losing?”—baited me to listen while running an errand. I was curious how they would choose to cover an organization like the DSA.

The half-hour started unobjectionably enough. The host, Natalie Kitroeff, asked Cohn the program’s characteristic question: not just “what happened,” but “what to make” of what happened. A candidate named Abdul El-Sayed had won in Michigan against a moderate Democrat with tens of millions of dollars in funding. A candidate named Francesca Hong had lost in Wisconsin to a no-name moderate opponent.

After parsing some data about the age of voters, they transitioned to the part of the conversation that prompted me to white-knuckle my steering wheel. Building momentum, Kitroeff tees up Cohn: “What else does the data say about the divides here, the coalitions?” Cohn responds with the show’s characteristic confidence. Here’s the first part of his response, the “what happened”:

“In both states, [...] high-income voters stand out as a major area of strength for moderates, with income in general just being one of the key fault lines here. In neighborhoods where people make $150,000 or more, there were often cases where the moderate candidates won by two to one.”

With the exception of classifying households earning $150,000 as “high-income,” this explanation is an objective description of the voter data. But what comes next is how the intrepid commuter should interpret this outcome, what they should “make of” it:

“I don’t think this should be terribly surprising. If the progressive left in general, and these candidates specifically, really stand for anything in terms of policy, it’s to take on the billionaires, corporations, and wealth inequality in the country, and it makes sense that high-income voters would be particularly hesitant to embrace those candidates.”

There are a few assumptions embedded in this framing that don’t withstand even the gentlest scrutiny, but in the breezy dialogue of the episode, the notion that households earning $150,0003 would “be particularly hesitant to embrace” candidates who want to “take on the billionaires, corporations, and wealth inequality” is a reality that “should [not] be terribly surprising.” Implicit is the premise that hesitancy among this group is rational, justified. It’s presented as a given that this group’s alignment with moderates is an accurate reflection of legitimate class interests.

There’s no mention of the fact that a household income of $150,000 is solidly within the “middle-income” range4 of the distribution, nor is there an indication that this is precisely the group—middle-income wage workers—that would likely stand to benefit most from rebalancing the power in corporations, the entities which control and exert downward pressure on those wages.

Since at least 2000, labor’s share of national income has been steadily declining. Corporate profits as a share of GDP are at record highs. Had wages kept pace with productivity, a 2020 working paper coauthored by economist found, the 2018 median income in the US would’ve been almost doubled: $92,000 rather than $50,000. Edwards and her coauthor estimate that income for those in the “90th percentile” would’ve been 67% higher “had income growth since 1975 remained as equitable as it was in the first two post-War decades.” You wouldn’t know any of that from this analysis.5

This rhetorical flattening of class interests in our political discourse is powerful and ubiquitous, so much so that we rarely recognize it as ideological at all, reinforcing as it does the class confusion that makes middle-income people identify with the interests of “billionaires” and “corporations.”

This essay is continued after a message from our partner, Domain Money.

One of the questions I’ve received most over the years that I’ve felt least qualified to weigh in on confidently is the question of the mystical 529: How much precedence should (or shouldn’t) this take when other goals (retirement, childcare, housing) often feel more urgent? Tuition, adjusted for inflation, has risen roughly 197% since 1963*, and it’s not at all clear whether these trends will continue, which means there’s a lot of pressure and uncertainty around the decision.

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And now, back to the essay:

There’s some acknowledgment of this reality elsewhere in the episode when Kitroeff and Cohn observe that moderate Democrats seem to be adjusting their phrasing, if not their policy priorities. Inspired by the populist rhetoric of the “far left,” they note, establishment presidential contenders like Gavin Newsom—a man who looks like an AI-generated response to a prompt for American Politician™️—have adopted the expression “it’s not right vs. left, it’s top vs. down.” As a clumsy sentiment about the source of division, I agree, but it’s critically important to clarify where “the top” is. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. Those represented in the chart by the blue line are households earning an average of $132,000 per year, the closest in the data set to the “high-income” voters discussed in the episode whose hesitancy shouldn’t be terribly surprising:

These are the realities that had me audibly responding to Cohn in my empty car, asking, “Does it?” when the chief political analyst at the largest and most well-funded news organization on the most popular podcast in the United States explains that it “makes sense” that “high-income” voters—a group one can demonstrate visually with the blue line above—would be “hesitant” to “embrace” the economic policies of the progressive left, which he accurately describes as “going after wealth inequality.”

THERE ARE A FEW PLAUSIBLE EXPLANATIONS. Maybe it was an inarticulate oversight. Given the production value of the show and this particular segment’s function as a supporting beam of the episode’s argument, I find this relatively unlikely. (The credits for this episode in particular list nine people; the show’s overall credits list 51.)

Maybe nobody among the show’s team of fact checkers, the crew of producers and editors, or the chief political analyst himself felt this data about income inequality and the declining labor share of income was relevant enough to challenge this framing.

Maybe the sentiment—that high-income people feel threatened by politicians who want to address wealth inequality, and for some reason households earning $150,000 appear to count themselves among this group—didn’t strike anyone in the room as a politically interesting phenomenon in and of itself, the kind of quirk that would, amid historic income inequality, seemingly present a far more interesting angle for a show billed as diving into the biggest stories of our time.

Maybe it didn’t occur to anyone that it was a perfect opportunity to distinguish for their millions of listeners what “high-income” actually means and whose interests are actually under threat by the ascendant left; maybe nobody thought it useful to resurrect that favored phrase always applied so readily when the voters in question are working-class conservatives showing up for Republicans: that people are “voting against their own interests.”

Or maybe this framing—and its implication that definitionally middle-income voters would be hurt by candidates who, if they “stand for anything in terms of policy,” want to “take on the billionaires, corporations, and wealth inequality”—was intentional, a reinforcement of the very confusion that analysis is supposed to clarify.

To echo the favored semantic setup on “The Daily,” what, then, should we make of that?

• Do we like Sterling Point? Critics seem to love it. I’m one episode in and it seems fine so far. (Slate)

• Currently reading Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays by the incomparable Eula Biss. Doggy-eared this page in an essay about Mexico and NAFTA:

• If this foldable iPhone is real, unfortunately I must cop to the obnoxious tug of desire. It costs more than a MacBook Pro. Ugh. (YouTube)

*Based on the “College Tuition Inflation Rate” Report from EducationData.org. Money with Katie is a promoter of Domain, a real client, and receives compensation in connection with sponsorship of this newsletter. This compensation creates a conflict of interest because it may influence the content presented, including the featuring of Domain Money or its advisors. The views expressed by the promoter are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Domain Money. This communication is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as a recommendation, offer, or solicitation for the purchase or sale of any security. All financial planning and investment strategies should be tailored to the unique circumstances and objectives of each client.

THE MOST POWERFUL FANTASIES are the ones that seem so natural and obvious that it’s hard to imagine a reality apart from them—in other words, the ones that don’t feel like fantasies at all. I’m talking, of course, about the American Dream^®, and by the American Dream^®, of course I mean home ownership.

The home ownership society was designed to bolster the feeling, if not the reality, of middle-class wealth. As a result, a 2025 working paper called “Giving Up” suggests that the feeling, if not the reality, of exclusion from that wealth produces a cascade of economic consequences: that the “perceived probability of attaining home ownership” is such a universally potent catalyst that it changes how people “live, work, and plan for the future,” reshaping the economy in the process.

Renters tend to believe home ownership is “within reach” when their net worth exceeds $300,000, the paper’s authors find, but strange things happen just below this threshold, in that paltry quarter-million zone.1 Between $200,000 and $300,000, a pattern of behavioral quirks emerges, a Bermuda Triangle of wealth where signals of fiscal prudence jam and good intentions mysteriously vanish from radar. Those in this range self-report higher incidences of a few unsavory habits and beliefs conducted in the grand tradition of fuck it, why not, from an increased likelihood of investing in cryptocurrency2 to spending more on their credit cards and espousing an attitude that hard work doesn’t matter. Hard work, that Protestant ideal so central to the American ethos, appears to be abandoned when the even-more-central ideal—private property—seems unattainable.

The paper (full title: “‘Giving Up’: The Impact of Decreasing Housing Affordability on Consumption, Work Effort, and Investment”) earned somber coverage across a spate of serious newspapers and magazines, in part because home ownership is among our few remaining bipartisan values. The Washington Post reported the findings with the headline that “abandoning homeownership” was “changing how people behave at work and home.” The Financial Times concluded the housing crisis was “pushing Gen Z into crypto and economic nihilism.” In The Atlantic, the paper was cited in an article about the “oligarchy of old people” to suggest that “feeling locked out of owning a home casts a malaise.” Housing unaffordability has been tied to everything from quiet quitting to the proliferation of sports betting apps, a loose extension of the so-called “housing theory of everything,” published in 2021 in Works in Progress magazine, that says housing shortages are not merely about affordability, but about “inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates,” a laundry list of real and imagined crises, each of which is supposedly downstream from the gauntlet of the housing market.3

THE HOME, IT SHOULD BE SAID, IS A SYMBOL as much as it is a shelter. There’s hardly a synecdoche for the American dream more evocative and recognizable than that of the white picket fence, a border concerned for most of its history as much with who it kept out as what it enclosed. That the dream of home ownership is so powerful a motivator that its elusiveness could throw society as we know it into a tailspin is a neat and appealing story, the kind engineered to be clicked and shared and bemoaned, a perfect example of “that which you do not need evidence to believe.”

While I initially found the premise plausible, I became more interested in the explanation’s appeal after I saw that Tyler Cowen (whose recent tracts for The Free Press include “You’ll Learn to Love AI Writing” and “The Folly of ‘Affordability’ Politics”) endorsed “Giving Up” as “one of the best, most interesting, and most important papers” he’d ever read. Cowen is a libertarian, a self-styled free-thinking contrarian who loves capitalism and thinks universal healthcare would hurt young people. That Cowen and I—maintaining our radically different perspectives on class, power, and systems—could both seamlessly integrate these insights into our worldviews only underscores the ubiquity of home ownership supremacy in our collective consciousness.

But further investigation of the paper’s data reveals, as it often does, that we’re talking about vanishingly small differences in self-reported attitudes: 2–3% of homeowners report believing that it’s fine to put forth low effort at work, compared to 4–6% of renters slogging through the nadir of pessimism that is being a quarter-millionaire without a mortgage. Usually, this is reported as “double the rate,” which can obfuscate the fact that a more meaningful takeaway might be that up to 96% of the demoralized group still believes working hard is important. I could speculate about what it is about this particular level of wealth that causes up to 6% of those surveyed to feel despondent about their chances, but each explanation is less interesting than what that despondency tells us about the role housing has assumed in the American psyche.

Embedded in the analysis of the paper is the belief that home ownership—whether as a hurdle one has already cleared, or, more powerfully, expects to clear in the future—leads to superior financial behavior, behavior a GDP-ravenous country would want to cultivate. In the controlled environment of the statistical model, material conditions are largely downstream of such behavior, which is itself downstream of beliefs. This situates the thesis in pretty comfortable opposition to a materialist interpretation, which says our beliefs are shaped by nothing as much as our material conditions. (Tellingly, the authors lightly advise against “transfers targeted only to the poorest households,” which would be unlikely to “move people across the threshold where they start behaving differently.”) In summary, the study suggests a subsidy to boost a subset of close-enough renters above what it identifies as the “giving-up threshold,” noting that such a transfer would “reduc[e] reliance on the social safety net.” The idea, as I understand it, is that getting moderately affluent renters over this hump of ennui will have permanent positive effects on the economy writ large. Home ownership is presumed the only carrot large enough to produce such outcomes.

Couched as it is in language about promoting self-sufficiency, the prescription still earned scorn in the comments sections of blogs like Cowen’s among those who conclude the paper’s suggested causality between home ownership and prudent investment behavior is likely backwards. It’s not that owning a home makes you behave better, one person named “Other M” wrote, but that “people who behave better are more likely to own a home.” Other M’s logic relies on an idea offered elsewhere in the article discussion that those who own homes “display patience” and “a long-term orientation” that would be undermined if subsidies were doled out willy-nilly.

But the correlation between property ownership and virtuous behavior is almost certainly looser than that between property ownership and being located on a well-positioned branch of a prosperous family tree. The fear that subsidies will create poor behavioral outcomes by distorting the work ethic that would have otherwise propelled a young renter to the vaunted propertied class seems invalidated by the data about how first-time homeowners already buy homes: More than half of homeowners under the age of 45 received a subsidy, so to speak, in accordance with the RPAP, or the Rich Parents Assistance Plan: 56% of millennial and 78% of Gen Z homeowners bought their home with the assistance of family money, according to a May 2026 LendingTree survey.4 Half of this group received more than 40% of the down payment. In that sense, the paper’s policy prescription shouldn’t be debated in terms of whether to introduce home ownership subsidies—which are functionally more common than not as it is—but whether to standardize them.

I’m dragging us through this subsidization digression not to make an argument for or against it, but to underscore the many ways our shared mythology of the American dream—who attains it, how, when, and why—tends to deviate substantially from the boring facts on the ground. The ideology is so powerful and all-encompassing that we rarely recognize it as such, instead dismissing these contradictory facts even when they’re plainly cataloged before us.

I noticed this for the first time when I published my original rent vs. buy analysis half a decade ago to an unusually impassioned response. It’s practically a rule of financial publishing that if you’re light on pageviews, you should post something about a young renter eschewing home ownership in favor of investing elsewhere. Read any article of this nature in virtually any newspaper or magazine, and you’ll be greeted at the end by an uprising of longtime owners wielding HOA-compliant pitchforks, insisting the author is either too young or too liberal or too stupid to know any better. There’s no other topic in the entire realm of what we call “financial literacy” that enjoys such a high-octane rejection of basic math, no other cost-benefit calculation that routinely causes otherwise-analytical grown-up readers of financial news, pink with exasperation, to wave away the clinical compounding returns charts for the warm embrace of conventional wisdom. As custom dictates, I must now disclaim: There are plenty of good reasons to buy a home, but high ROI is rarely among them, and that’s fine.

THAT RENTING AND INVESTING WHAT'S LEFT OVER in the stock market tends to produce better financial outcomes holds true so long as you’re disciplined enough to invest the difference consistently, which virtually nobody is. This lends some credence to the “forced savings” argument for a mortgage, even if the vast majority of mortgage payments (and the accumulating peripheral costs) during the average ownership tenure are as unrecoverable as rent, absorbed as they are by insurance and financing costs and property taxes, or otherwise trips to Lowe’s and coercing the HVAC repairman to just top up the Freon and call it a day. It’s an undeniably good inflation hedge. Still, most of the supposed gains from ownership come from levering up 5x (otherwise known as putting 20% down and borrowing the rest) and outright ignoring all the transaction expenses that bookend your time in a given residence. But that’s all boring shit. A few homeowners get lucky, others break even, and many—most, if we’re running a stringent rent-and-invest counterfactual—will actually end up slightly in the negative, even if the home appreciates on paper. Why, then, does the myth of home ownership’s financial supremacy persist, despite so much evidence to the contrary?

One potential conclusion: The association between home ownership and the core fantasy of the American middle class runs deeper than money. Money is merely the ill-fitting, all-purpose justification for its persistence. This is close to a clean inverse of the argument I usually find myself constructing, where some cultural object of fascination that appears to be about something else is in fact about wealth, or class, or economics. This is my own housing theory of everything: This enormous, leveraged, and amortized purchase has, somehow, become the beginning and end of the American dream, a shared illusion, a Bermuda Triangle of its own.

There’s something about home ownership—the sense that I am here, I am really here, and I am here to stay—that permits all manner of irrational behavior and belief, appealing as it does to our sense of belonging, permanence, tradition, conformity, ascendance, legacy, even fear of death. Understood in these terms, the suggestion that exclusion from this manufactured rite of passage would radically alter one’s personal values system seems not just believable, but outright inevitable. A home of one’s own activates something in us beyond the grasp of that calculating and sophisticated frontal lobe, appealing instead to somewhere deep inside the shadowy crawlspace of our brains that, as with all good propaganda, feels so innate, so instinctual, as to be irrefutable.

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• Shopping from a library computer might mean getting lower prices, but the evidence is mixed. Either way, surveillance pricing feels like a ship that’s already sailed for me, because I’ve played way too fast and loose with my data. (Mozilla Foundation)

• The average US household spent an estimated $1,000 more in 2025 because of tariffs. Now the government is refunding corporations, to the tune of $100 billion. Customers, the trade law experts say, don’t have much hope of seeing any of it. (Washington Post)

• Taylor Swift and Lana del Rey’s weddings as two interpretations of the American Girl dream, both demonstrating how extreme wealth liberates one to behave as tackily as they please. Once again, Grazie Sophia Christie’s new column is a treat. I only wish she’d write weekly. (The Point)

• How Caro Claire Burke wrote the biggest book of the year. Let the record reflect I take full credit for all 1.4 million copies sold. (New Yorker)

• 2,500 years of American history, Sam Kriss-style. Sometimes I read his work and feel like it’s insulting to the craft to call myself a writer. About the veracity of this country’s preferred origin story (one sentence, by the way):

“If that were true, then that would mean that the United States is a propositional nation that no longer believes in its own proposition, can barely even comprehend what those dead men in wigs once meant by liberty or enlightenment, the idea of humanity growing out of its self-imposed childhood, because the realisation of that idea is a society of children, scared in the world, desperately wanting someone to tell them what to do, some vast impersonal system of rewards to tell them what to desire, a society that can’t recognise itself in the mirror of history, left with nothing at all, just the world’s biggest cars, the world’s firmest tits, the world’s most overflowing supermarkets, the world’s most advanced bombs falling on distant villages on the other side of the world.”

• Does hating influencers make you a misogynist? Diabolical Lies investigates Paige Lorenze’s Instagram history and the feminist question of “influence”:

Diabolical Lies

Does Hating Influencers Make You a Misogynist?

Listen now

a month ago · 124 likes · 47 comments · caro claire burke and Katie Gatti Tassin

LAST WEEK, SOCIOLOGIST CLARK RANDALL AND I convened on Google Meet to discuss his Jacobin article, “No, We’re Not All to Blame for Poverty,” a critique of Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America (2023). The book’s conceit is that poverty persists in the US in part because it benefits the otherwise blameless upper-middle class. Randall counters in his piece that Desmond is “misidentifying the engine of this [class] division as those with varying amounts of relative privilege,” rather than attributing it to the engineers themselves. Since Randall also studies public finance, inequality, and the politics of pensions and 401(k)s, I used the opportunity to bombard him with a few related questions, like whether investing in the stock market eventually transforms a respectably beleaguered wage worker into an unsympathetic “capitalist.”

My curiosity was born from a never-ending debate in the philosophically inclined, left-wing flank of personal finance’s standing army: If you believe the exploitation of workers is a feature, rather than a bug, of the system’s plumbing, doesn’t the act of personally amassing capital violate your stated belief? Gee, one might uncharitably say, for someone who hates capitalism so much, you sure seem to enjoy suckling at the teat of capital! While this dilemma almost certainly makes the self-indulgent and (sorry) neoliberal mistake of politicizing the personal, it’s reasonable that some feel as though critiquing capital while capital pays the bills emits the undeniable stench of hypocrisy.1

But the type of investing we do as members of the wage-earning public, Randall told me, lacks the defining features of true capitalist accumulation, like profiting from someone else’s labor instead of doing the work yourself. Even a very high-earning employee who invests in a 401(k) is not “becoming a capitalist,” he reasoned, by the very nature of their status as someone else’s employee. I pressed him for a more specific delineation—aren’t the profits from stocks technically created by someone else’s labor, too?—and he paused thoughtfully, then directed me to the mechanism by which this sort of retail investment happens. In terms of Gen Pop’s access to the stock market, he said, “we’re bag holders,” largely providing the “exit liquidity” for real capitalists.

His analysis sidesteps the trouble of ascertaining the precise location where prosperity shades into excess within the gradations of middle-class security; it concedes that while those with retirement plans and mortgages may enjoy radically different levels of comfort from those in poverty, their lives are not structurally different. Nobody loves a prolonged, catastrophic crash more than Warren Buffett, he said by way of explanation, and nobody hates one more than an almost-retired millionaire who’s just spent their entire life working and investing prudently. When billionaires like Buffett famously “buy low” during downturns, implied on the other side of the transaction is someone who’s selling low—most often, hordes of regular people who may have no other choice, because they either need the money now or don’t have the time to ride out further losses.

Most retail investors use an elegant device called an index fund to build wealth over time, a product that “passively” tracks a collection of stocks selected according to a set of rules. But words like “passive” and “rules” erroneously suggest a bland objectivity, obfuscating the fact that someone is actively shaping where the money flows.

For a recent case study in bag holder capitalism, consider the SpaceX IPO, the largest in history, at an almost comically unjustified $1.77 trillion valuation. In the past, Nasdaq enforced a three-month waiting period before a freshly public company could be considered for inclusion in the Nasdaq-100. Former Fidelity fund manager George Noble writes that this waiting period existed to give the market time to deflate the IPO hype and determine a real price, thereby protecting the average retirement saver “from being forced into untested, illiquid stocks.”

But a suspiciously timed Nasdaq rules change called “Fast Entry”—circulated for a perfunctory “consultation” in February and approved March 30—shortened the waiting period for including mega-cap stocks in tried-and-true indexes like the Nasdaq-100 from its customary three-month delay to just 15 trading days. According to a scoop from Reuters, the timing adjustment appeared to be Nasdaq’s answer to an explicit request from SpaceX for early index inclusion, which “gives companies increased access to the deep-pocketed institutional investors who typically buy sizable positions for their own index funds.” In other words, inclusion in a major index guarantees that a stock becomes a “buy.”

Under the new rules, SpaceX—which briefly made Musk a paper trillionaire—joined the Nasdaq-100 a few weeks ago, which meant every index fund tracking the Nasdaq-100 (like the popular QQQ) was “required to buy SpaceX shares almost immediately after the IPO,” writes Rudro Chakrabarti for Moneywise, and during “an engineered liquidity squeeze” at that.

A related easing of CRSP’s eligibility rules for index inclusion (about public “float,” or how many shares have to be available to the proles) meant the CRSP US Total Market Index—the benchmark that the ubiquitous Vanguard index ETF VTI tracks—added SpaceX after just five trading days. Noble, the former Fidelity fund manager, called these changes “the most shameless structural manipulation of a major index” he’d ever seen. “45 years in this business and I’ve watched Wall Street find creative new ways to separate retail investors from their money in every cycle,” he writes. “But usually they at least try to be subtle about it.” Rules changes aside, this is just how it’s designed to work: Forbes notes dryly in its coverage of SpaceX that, of course, a major expectation going into any IPO is that “early and major investors”—the capitalists—will “make a killing from selling some of their shares to retail investors [...] at soaring prices.”

Automatically including SpaceX in major indexes just weeks after its overhyped IPO all but ensured an inflow of zombie buyers like me, whose automatic transfers purchased it in accordance with the new rules. Those who bought it thanks to their VTI holdings (added June 18) paid approximately $185 per share; those who added it via QQQ (July 7) paid $149. Today, it’s trading at around $115.

The broad strokes bear a spiritual resemblance to a crypto rugpull, which unfolds with a mind-numbing predictability: A new “coin” is launched and hyped, a flood of new entrants buys it and pushes the price up, and then early investors dump their “shares,” thereby “pulling out the rug.” Those left in the aftermath are, pitifully, said to be “holding the bag.”

The difference with SpaceX, of course, is that the “flood of entrants” isn’t composed of gullible basement dwellers actively choosing to load up on $TRUMP and Fartcoin, but regular investors dollar-cost averaging their inflation-battered paychecks into individual retirement accounts. In this case, it’s less about immediate, coordinated dumping—there are “lock-up” rules to prevent that2—and more about, as they say, the principle of the thing: changing the rules of the game to reward hype, forcing an outrageous overvaluation on retail investors, and trailblazing for OpenAI and Anthropic in the process, both of which are racing toward IPOs of their own.

The SpaceX exposure inside VTI and QQQ is still small (around 0.14% and 1%, respectively), but analysts expect its presence to grow over the coming months—not because the value of the underlying asset is growing, but because of how a stock’s weight in an index is calculated. Next week, those lock-ups will start expiring, which means pre-IPO SpaceX investors will begin selling their shares. “As the number of shares in the public market increases,” Tom Lauricella writes for Morningstar, “index fund investors will find that SpaceX is becoming a greater share of their portfolio.” Analyst Zachary Evens says that SpaceX’s presence in funds like QQQ is likely to balloon, estimating that by the end of September it’ll be weighted similarly to Walmart, a (profitable) business with 38x SpaceX’s revenue.3

This nakedly HODL-brained dynamic underscores a fundamental truth about the relationship between retail investors and capital-C Capital, particularly with respect to indexing, which has become, practically speaking, the backbone of our retirement savings system: Capital deeming something a “sell” automatically makes it a “buy” for everyone else. That, Randall would say, is the difference between a wage worker methodically investing for the future and a capitalist. One is hoping for modest returns in exchange for unknowingly providing exit liquidity; the other is Elon Musk.

This issue was brought to you by Poshmark.

If you’ve had your eye on a particular piece—whether vintage, designer, archival, or maybe just “out of budget” purchased new—it’s probably on Poshmark, a marketplace with millions of new and pre-loved items.

Buying secondhand is great for a few reasons that you can pat yourself on the back about, like reducing waste, extending the lifespan of a piece, and still getting a high-quality item, probably for a fraction of the cost. On Poshmark, you’ll find items from brands like Loewe, Zimmermann, DÔEN, Hill House, Farm Rio, Vuori, and more.

For example, I’ve been loafer-curious for years, but the style I liked was too expensive to justify buying new. I found them on Poshmark—the listing had the Posh Authenticate badge, which means they went through an authentication process—for less than half the retail price, an unworn “factory reject” pair thanks to a barely-there scuff.

And if you’re in the process of simplifying your closet and want your items to have a second life, too, it’s easy to sell on Poshmark. Back when I worked at Southwest—where I had access to a shipping label printer—I practically ran a Poshmark resale operation out of the mail room. (Has the statute of limitations expired on admitting this?)

Shop and share your style on Poshmark today.

“Should I leave my low-cost-of-living city for the opportunities of a high-cost-of-living place?”

I plucked this question out of my “Reader and Listener Feedback” folder during a particularly feverish inbox purge this weekend and felt called to answer it in today’s ‘sletter. (The following has been shortened for clarity, anonymity, and #KGTHouseStyle.)

Should we continue living in a low-cost-of-living area near our family, or move somewhere “more exciting” for all those big-city opportunities everyone swears by? (We work remotely.)

Right now, our rent costs 12% of our gross income. Moving to a high-cost-of-living city would make that number jump to about 25%, which means less travel, tighter room for childcare, and everything else that comes with city life. Meanwhile, staying put, we’re investing the maximums in our 401(k)s, saving another 5–10%, and still enjoying 30–35% for guilt-free spending. Hard to argue with that math just to chase a vague sense of “more opportunity.”

How would you frame this tradeoff between low-cost-of-living near family with more travel and breathing room, vs. high-cost-of-living with energy and access? How do I make peace with staying put and tune out the noise telling me I’m missing out?

MY INITIAL INSTINCT IS we need to define “opportunity” more precisely. In my view, having copious discretionary income and being near family (assuming you like them) are both massive “opportunities” for quality of life.

If by “big-city opportunities” you mean the chance to ascend a career ladder, I assume that means you’d be happy to swap your current remote work situation for (ostensibly) heading into an office, hence the relocation component. If not, the vague sense of potential career progression might be overstated and dissipate upon further inspection, but it depends on your field.

If you simply mean the opportunity to experience new things (“energy and access”) and you’re willing to pay a premium for that, then it sounds like you could make it work—albeit with less financial wiggle room, since about 40% of your “guilt-free” money would be reallocated to housing. Still, you have a lot of breathing room already, so I don’t think the money is (or should be) the true deciding factor here.

I got the sense from your question’s framing—particularly the comment about “making peace”—that you’re less concerned with making this choice and more interested in accepting the choice you’ve already made to stay put. I once read that your experience of where you live is primarily defined by your immediate surroundings (that is, your neighborhood), and in my life, this has been true. Having lived in two different parts of Denver just a couple miles apart, I watched my lifestyle change drastically between locations—even within the bounds of the same “place.”

All that to say, I think location comparisons must also be considered in the micro, outside of the “big city”/“small town” binary, to be truly useful: Living walking-distance to a city center, near a beautiful park, or above a particularly fantastic coffee shop, for example, can radically alter your experience of a place. (I’m a slut for mature trees! Approximately 78% of my mental health outcomes are dependent upon seeing nature outside my window.) If you’re craving more energy or a change of pace but don’t feel entirely sold on the tradeoffs required to uproot yourself completely, is it possible there’s somewhere else in your own town that you might enjoy more?

• Four words: Hill House Nap Dress. (Not sponsored nor an affiliate, just a genuine discovery made this weekend whilst trawling Nordstrom with my more fashion-forward sister-in-law, Maverick.) Apparently everyone knew about this signature design except for me. It feels sacrilegious to tell you about not one but two purchases in a publication ostensibly about personal finance, but given enough caffeine I think I could spin this into a “manage your money well and you can splurge along the way” lesson. I went a little overboard and got two: the Ellie and the Charlotte. Dresses are such an easy way to look put together without (a) actually trying or (b) suffering the indignity of a waistband.

• This week on Diabolical Lies, I mounted (what I hope is) a fair-minded critique of the book-cum-aspiring Democratic Party platform Abundance. Caro, for her part, bravely and endearingly fumbled through an elaborate mixed metaphor to explain supply and demand.

Diabolical Lies

How "Abundance" Lost the Left

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2 months ago · 103 likes · 24 comments · Katie Gatti Tassin and caro claire burke

• The funniest thing I read on the internet this week was Father Karine’s “an open letter to my dog who, if i’m being completely honest, lowkey kinda sucks.” Tears in my eyes.

• Super cool, boss man:

@conajam_working with Scandinavians

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I’ve been thinking a lot about cars lately, but not for financially or environmentally righteous reasons. Boxy new Lexus GX 550s are slowly propagating through the Denver streets as a legion of upper-class moms upgrade their three-year-old GX 460s, right on schedule. Every time one cruises by, I crane my neck around, situational awareness be damned, to admire it.

The other day, out of curiosity, I looked up the MSRP—starts at $68,335, the Lexus site coolly informed me—and fantasized about its many features for which I have no discernible use. 9,096 pounds of towing capacity? A twin-turbo V6? Now I just need to find something to tow! Look, I’m not proud, especially because I know better—the second-most-visited article on my site is called “Why Leasing a Car Is Like Setting Money on Fire,” published five years ago in April 2021, a follow-up to the almost-as-popular 2020 post “Why You Need to Sell Your Car.” Consider this a third addendum, “Why I Can’t Stop Desiring SUVs With a Third Row, Despite Myself.”

But the passing novelty of and interest in this particular vehicle is really no different than the object of last summer’s misguided attention, when I’d conspicuously circle any parked Land Rover Defender I encountered in the wild, mouth agape. The inexplicable magnetism of objects that look like what you’d get if Chanel designed tanks strikes me as a uniquely American pathology. Cars of this phylum feature prominently in a recent piece of satire1 called “I’m Bringing the Class War to Nantucket,” in which the narrator muses about whether G-Wagons can be proletarianized:

“Certainly the masses will have the right to claim all the wealth on Nantucket that’s been stolen from them, like my Uncle’s Ford Bronco (he has one of the tasteless new ones unfortunately, a 2023). But is the wealth on Nantucket, concentrated as it is in such vulgar forms, molded to bourgeois interests, not a hindrance to the further development of the class consciousness of the proletariat? [...] Perhaps we can commandeer some of the hundreds of G-Wagons and Land Cruisers these pigs have shipped out here for the summer. The bourgeois taste for military vehicles on this island indexes their unstated awareness of the class war.”

I’m tempted to disown my bourgeois taste in this anecdote by saying something about how we’re all products of our environment—maybe I could even find an exonerating quote from a sociologist about how free will isn’t real—but instead I’ll speak for myself and admit that I’ve been susceptible to a hunky car for as long2 as I can remember, a fact of my character that’s always felt a little base. Like driving a Gucci belt.

It’d be easy to interpret this as a straightforward expression of organic consumer preferences; my begrudging attraction to popular luxury SUVs proof that for all my Good Little Comrade talk of investing in public transit and the scourge of cars in American infrastructure planning, The Masses actually yearn for privately owned four-wheel drive sport utility vehicles. In that respect, my beliefs about the importance of rejecting this value system are largely normative and aspirational, an exercise in disavowing the superficial status quo and imagining a world—and self—that might be less titillated by caramel-colored leather captain’s chairs.

In April, the CFP^® and financial writer wrote a post called “The best financial advice I can give you is to sell your car.” She cites AAA’s 2025 report, which calculated the average cost of vehicle ownership and operation in America at $11,577 per year—nearly $1,000 per month—a total that absorbs a dizzying list of car-related expenses, like “depreciation, finance charges, insurance, gas, maintenance, registration, and repairs.” When you consider that most households have two cars, Hanna adds, that means freedom of movement costs the average American family more than $20,000 per year. (Freedom isn’t free, etc.) The car’s centrality to shaping quality of life in the US is hard to overstate. One of the best predictors of presidential approval ratings? Gas prices.

To construct an entire nation—the lives of hundreds of millions of people—around near-complete dependence on this costly and inefficient mode of transport is, logically speaking, indefensible. And yet despite my thorough understanding of its nonsensical premise and costs, my capacity for dreaming bigger than 9,096 pounds of towing capacity has been annexed by Big Car, which is either a testament to the power of our built environment or evidence of my weak will.

Only one in 10 Americans report using public transit daily or weekly, a quarter of whom are located in the Northeast, where our oldest cities managed to squeak out transit projects before General Motors and Firestone started poking around. Roughly half of Americans have no access to public transportation at all. Single-family zoning laws, originally devised to box out non-whites using a few surgical pencil strokes on a map, ensured that dense, mixed-use towns3 conducive to walking, biking, buses, and trains would become expensive aberrations in a sea of sprawl. A consumer desire for the best bad option, then, must be understood as a response to the primary fact that, in many parts of this country, personal vehicle ownership is a legitimate precondition for full participation in life.

Essay continued after this message from our partner…

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And now, back to the essay:

This summer, my cohost Caro and I decided to send our listeners money. While we typically allocate one-third of our subscriber revenue to 501(c)(3) organizations or formal mutual aid funds, we wanted to experiment with this style of redistribution in part because we hoped it would normalize seeking and receiving support even when there’s nothing catastrophic to blame, no compelling story to share on GoFundMe.

As a former-personal-finance-blogger-turned-whatever-I am-now, I noticed patterns as I read through the submissions. There were, of course, your requisite egregious medical bills and job-loss costs, dispatches sent from the desperate, populous paperwork trenches of insurance appeals and unemployment applications, plenty of cases where our flimsy safety nets had clearly failed (and more than a few requests from Australia and the UK, countries in a similar location on the Late Capitalism Spectrum of advanced financialization).

But more common—and striking—was the mundanity of the need, the requests that evinced the ordinary economic strain downstream of how the average American life is organized. Of the 271 requests, a full 10% were related to the routine money stress inflicted by owning and maintaining a personal transportation device. Sometimes our financial turmoil is in fact acute and cataclysmic; more often, it’s banal, erosive, a predictable result of servicing both the debt and physical structures of expensive, privately owned assets.

Our desires are shaped and our lives are limited, in large part, by decisions that were made for us. As Hanna points out, car ownership involves a series of consumer decisions (brand, model, trim level, financing) that create a simulacrum of genuine personal choice, like my predilection for Suburban Safari Vehicles. But statistically speaking, if you live in the US, car ownership was going to be a fact of your life whether you “chose” it or not, guaranteed “decades ago, by policymakers, developers, car manufacturers, and oil companies.” That we tend to perceive these matters primarily as questions of individual preference or personal challenge with similarly personal financial answers (“Why Leasing a Car is Like Setting Money on Fire”) obscures the fact that the most decisive factor—whether you’d need to own one at all—was never really in question.

• Ross Douthat, conservative Times opinion columnist whose nonthreatening aura I once compared to that of a roly-poly bug, interviewed the founding editor of Jacobin on his show Interesting Times. His questions were, at times, a little facile (do we really think we’re going to plumb new depths by asking why Luigi Mangione became a meme folk hero to the Youths?), but I got a lot out of Bhaskar’s answers. (The New York Times)

• How have I never seen The Keepers (2017) until now? The way this documentary series—about the web of abuse and secrecy that unravels in the aftermath of a Baltimore nun’s murder—builds in such a satisfying way. (Netflix)

• Cannot stop listening to this “hate that i made you love me x …Baby One More Time” mashup. Those opening piano notes could wake me from a coma. (YouTube)

Until next time!

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Since February, I’ve been working on a book proposal for an essay collection about…well, that’s the problem. Articulating a pithy, one-line characterization of its core themes—disillusionment, cognitive dissonance, self-implication, fairness, contradiction, morality, striving—has proven challenging so far, hence the dedicated three-week Thought Binge. My brain feels like a soggy beach towel draped over a lawn chair in the sun, now partially dried in an awkward contortion.

The most time-consuming part of my writing process is research, so today I’m sharing a summer reading list of sorts: the 18 books that have shaped my writing so far, and the most surprising, memorable, or valuable takeaways from each. Titles are organized less by how I assume the publisher would classify the book and more by the particular reason I found it resonant, challenging, or worthwhile.

Do you feel like I’m cheating you by dumping a bunch of research in your lap? A little like ramming a grocery cart full of ingredients into your shins when you were promised a thoughtful, restrained four-course meal?

Hopefully in two more years—give or take—it’ll be time to eat.

This post might look better in your browser or Substack app; it accidentally ended up being quite long.

—––– CLASS PERFORMANCE —–––

Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence (2017) by Rachel Sherman

There’s almost too much to say about Uneasy Street, but at times this book felt like an X-ray. Sherman interviews wealthy New Yorkers and finds that they’re often absorbed—to a shocking degree—with “occupying their privilege legitimately.” People justify their good fortune in a few recurring ways, she finds: working hard (which legitimates any excess they may have), spending “prudently” (in other words, performing “reasonable” consumption), and demonstrating “awareness” (also known as checking your privilege).

Sherman infers that her respondents, many of whom earned more than $1 million per year, defined “real” affluence as not having to worry about money at all, rather than possessing a particular amount of it. In that sense, simply channeling financial anxiety—no matter how absurd, given the circumstances—was how the respondents reinforced their connection to the middle class. That the very wealthy are neurotic about locating themselves in the “moral middle” reveals, I think, that our culture’s attitudes about wealth are often in conflict with one another.

Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet (2023) by Taylor Lorenz

I picked up Extremely Online because I was researching an essay about influencers and how they best illustrate some of our bizarre expectations around class performance, as well as the tightrope they must walk to remain likable (Véronique Hyland astutely identified this as “the precise titration between aspirational and relatable” in her 2023 profile of Alix Earle, a phrase I keep returning to).

Lorenz’s book is the most worthwhile history of the social internet I’ve encountered so far (Get Rich or Lie Trying by Symeon Brown had a similar premise but ultimately wasn’t what I was looking for). Her examination of the monetization of the “mommy blogger” led me to a 2011 profile of one such internet pioneer in The New York Times which identified the central dynamic between influencer and audience that I find so fascinating:

“[I]f [affinity for your blog] is based on trust, do you violate that trust by introducing commerce? Readers of personal blogs return again and again for the connection, the feeling they really know the writer—and ads can break the ‘we’re all friends here’ mood.”

This element of the mainstream social internet—monetization of your personhood—is such a given now that it was almost jarring to see this tension considered so earnestly. It’d be easy to conclude the answer is “no,” given how influencer careers financed in this way ultimately exploded, but I think it’s more complicated.

—––– CONSUMPTION —–––

My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries (2016) by Elizabeth Chin

Anti-consumerism is such a pervasively moralized sentiment that I’m always interested when a writer attempts to study how their anti-consumerist beliefs deviate from their lived experiences of desiring and acquiring. Chin is writing from personal experience, but the contradictions she explores can be extrapolated: Few would deny sharing the normative belief that naked materialism is sordid and shallow, and yet the continued functioning of the American economy depends, to a large degree, on a majority of us conveniently forgetting all about that pesky, high-minded minimalism when Apple releases a new iPhone.

The real revelation of My Life with Things, for me, was that even Karl Marx, the most famous anti-capitalist to ever live, embodied this contradiction from time to time: “Marx—like myself—was complex and contradictory, espousing one sort of vision of the world in his intellectual work, while immersed in an utterly different one in his day-to-day life. What kind of committed communist, after all, lives in an upscale London suburb, throwing coming-out balls for his marriageable daughters?”

Having and Being Had (2020) by Eula Biss

Because Eula Biss is not an economics or financial writer by trade, language itself becomes a layered source of meaning in her short essays about “the discomfort of being comfortable,” or the sense of complicity a formerly working-class person feels after ascending into the security of the middle or upper-middle class. There’s one particularly memorable passage about how distraught she felt while signing up for her 401(k) plan at work:

“I want nothing to do with this, I think. But I want to retire. The adviser is assuring me now that even if the market dips, even if it crashes, it will come back up again. Given time, he says, it always comes back. I ask him if he can imagine this system of investment coming to an end. No, he says, your money is safe. But that’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking if there’s any way out of this.”

The Affluent Society (1958) by John Kenneth Galbraith

Classics like these provide surreal reading experiences because they feel like discovering the original text of our present-day conventional wisdom. (I didn’t include Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 The Theory of the Leisure Class in this list because I cannot in good conscience even appear to recommend that you sit down with something so dry, but similarly, that dusty little treatise gave us “conspicuous consumption.”)

One of Galbraith’s biggest contributions in this book is his theory of the advertising and consumption cycle: “The process by which wants are satisfied is also the process by which wants are created. The more wants that are satisfied, the more new ones are born.” Interpreting this for the influencer age was thrillng.

The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (1997) by Juliet B. Schor

Schor’s theory of American precarity is that we want (and buy) too much shit. I think this case would be more difficult to make today given how much more expensive “the basics” are (housing, healthcare, education), but it’s likely Schor would point to at least one of those—housing—and say it proves rather than undermines her theory of “an expansion of desire and expectation.” To hear Schor tell it, mass production and mass media coalesced (not altogether different from Galbraith’s theory) at the same moment the income distribution yawned open. As a result, those with the highest incomes and flashiest lifestyles became consumption pacesetters for everyone else.

This diagnosis seems fair enough to me; humans are mimetic creatures. Though I get the sense reading Schor that she feels some disgust as she catalogs the way our desires have expanded in response to an industrialized, globalized economy. Fair enough—but isn’t that the (alleged) point of capitalism? Innovation, a downward cost curve, microwaves and air conditioning becoming commonplace over time?

Analyses like these typically conclude that’s why you should simply want less, and dismiss the extent to which (as Galbraith would’ve put it) the mass production of our economic system requires mass consumption. Contentment with what you have is antithetical to the (current) structure of our economy. Nevertheless, her case is strong, and I could see the germinating seeds of the FI/RE movement in her description of “downshifters.”

—––– POVERTY —–––

In the Company of the Poor: Conversations with Dr. Paul Farmer and Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez (2013)

I picked up In the Company of the Poor to learn about an interpretation of Catholicism called liberation theology, which views oppression of the poor as the most urgent “structural sin” of modern life. Liberation theologists like Gutiérrez and Archbishop Oscar Romero (canonized in 2018) teach that “social and political action” in solidarity with those living in poverty is a “mandate” of the Christian faith, which makes it not well received by those “uninterested in…the political dimensions of following Jesus.”

For now, all I’ll say about this one is that it went a long way in explaining my attraction to a particular politics of redistribution. It’s noteworthy—and maybe not coincidental—that Catholicism is having such a cultural moment in the midst of our heightened awareness of economic inequality.

Poverty, by America (2023) by Matthew Desmond

Poverty, by America diverges from the style and tone of Desmond’s first book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, and it received a fair amount of criticism in wonkish circles for its methodology in measuring poverty. But I found it valuable for one thematic choice that felt brave and true, something that has stuck with me since my first reading in 2023: Desmond’s incisive clarity about the fact that poverty persists in large part because the middle and upper classes benefit from the deprivation of the lower class.

Not everybody finds this connection compelling. One review—“No, We’re Not All to Blame for Poverty” by Clark Randall for Jacobin—was so vehement in its disagreement with Desmond’s thesis (which he called “individualized guilt dressed up as political-economic analysis”) that I reached out to him to discuss it. We’re meeting later today.

Still, sometimes you see a chart that makes you go hmm, and yet…:

Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich: Wealth, Poverty, and Early Christian Formation (2012) by Helen Rhee, PhD

I mostly read this to supplement In the Company of the Poor to better understand the Christian history of wealth redistribution and, as Rhee put it, “the social responsibilities of the Gospel.” Rhee—a professor of the history of Christianity—writes about “sufficiency” and “common enjoyment” but leaves these definitions mostly open to interpretation. As a worldly student of Hedonic adaptation (the tendency known as “lifestyle creep” in personal finance parlance), I know it’s a slippery slope to permit yourself to define what “sufficient” means; that “sufficient” itself is not a static benchmark. To put it plainly: There’s no obvious place to stop when there’s always more available.

She seems to recognize this problem of relativity, too, in her commentary about how rich Americans are when considered in a wider context: “A vast majority of Americans, who belong to the top 5–10 percent of the richest people in the world by a global standard, identify themselves as the middle class yet without a firm sense of economic security or contentment.”

This list is continued after a message from today’s partner, Betterment.

I have a confession to make: Despite transforming my entire identity into that of Personal Finance Personality, I haven’t had a traditional “emergency fund” in years. I was living fast and loose with my money either (a) in my checking account or (b) in an investment account set to a 90% stock allocation, with no in-between. Because of this, I never had any real reason for saving meaningfully in a dedicated high-yield cash account.

With my major lifestyle shift to self-employment, that changed in 2026. Now I’m absolutely lousy* with high-yield cash accounts, each earmarked for its own special use case: my taxes, for one, now that I’m setting aside a whopping 30% of everything I earn. It would pain me too much to watch that money rot in checking, earning nothing. (If you’re not sure how to start and fund your emergency fund, check out this new 2026 emergency funds deep dive!)

With Betterment’s high-yield cash account called “Cash Reserve,” new customers can:

• ✅ Earn up to a 4.00% variable APY with a qualifying deposit—that’s nearly 10x the national average—on the same platform where you’re growing your investments.

• 🤩 Save with no fees or minimum balances.

• 👼 Feel assured that up to $8 million (joint) or $4 million (individual) is FDIC-insured (though I can’t think of any scenario in which I’d ever recommend keeping millions in cash; go with God, comrade). That’s 16x what most banks offer.

Open your Cash Reserve account today and start saving for tomorrow. You can even create multiple savings goals and use Betterment’s automated tools to help you achieve them.

🥳 Put your cash to work with Betterment Cash Reserve and earn up to a 4.00% variable APY with a qualifying deposit.

*OK, I have two. Still, that’s an infinite increase over zero.

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—––– ECONOMIC PHILOSOPHY —–––

If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (2000) by G.A. Cohen

“I now believe that a change in social ethos, a change in the attitudes people sustain toward each other in the thick of daily life, is necessary for producing equality, and that belief brings me closer than I ever expected to be to the Christian view of these matters that I once disparaged,” writes Cohen in his introduction.

The title of this one grabbed me immediately, for obvious reasons, but it turns out it’s a book of philosophy lectures in which only the final lecture takes on its titular question directly. Reading philosophy often makes me want to swallow a package of weed gummies and watch the most insultingly overwrought reality television imaginable, but when I power through, the most common effect is a sense that my certainty in literally anything is misplaced. (Reading philosophy is like: And what exactly is meant here by “certainty”? Allow us to discuss for 3,000 words.)

In the last lecture, Cohen turns his attention to the question of the rich egalitarian—if A believes in equality and A is also rich, is A’s behavior consistent with A’s belief?—and then sets up and deconstructs a few common ways to deflect the question. (Frustratingly, he never arrives at a concrete answer, but at one point he breaks the fourth wall and concedes it’s likely not a hot topic for philosophers of egalitarianism because working philosophers are, broadly speaking, much better off than most.)

Responsibility for Justice (2014) by Iris Marion Young

I’m still working my way through this one, but I chose to read it because I saw a review that praised how Young thinks about “the complex relationship between individual responsibility and structural injustice.” So far the most salient point I’ve taken away is that “luck” (typically considered no different than random chance) in financial outcomes—e.g., this person is lucky to be talented in a way that often generates high compensation in our society, like being particularly adept at, say, trading derivatives for a hedge fund—ignores both the structures that make those talents the ones worthy of high compensation as well as the backgrounds that tend to allow someone to develop and exploit such a talent in the first place.

– CRITIQUES OF PERSONAL FINANCE & PHILANTHROPY –

Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry (2012) by Helaine Olen

It’s surprising that Pound Foolish has remained relatively lonely in its willingness to investigate the conventional wisdom that financial literacy “works.” “By almost every available measure,” Olen writes, “the financial literacy of the American public has remained dismal in the almost two decades since the movement began.”

It’s not clear whether her assessment is based on demonstrated financial knowledge when polled or actual financial outcomes, but the real trouble is the tenuous relationship between the knowledge and the outcomes: A 2014 metastudy of 201 previous studies attempting to quantify the relationship found that efforts to improve financial literacy “explain only 0.1% of the variance” in behavior when controlling for things like “psychological traits,” and that virtually any discernible impact entirely vanished after 20 months.

This suggests that learning about money often doesn’t directly translate to doing better, and while I think it’d be ridiculous for me to say that knowing how to manage money doesn’t matter, it seems clear enough that knowledge alone is rarely sufficient if you don’t have surplus in the first place.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018) by Anand Giridharadas

Giridharadas is a former McKinsey consultant who applies a critical eye to the market-friendly notion that the sort of wealthy do-gooders who congregate at the Aspen Ideas Festival will fix our problems through personal philanthropy, a tack he says mostly serves to deflect calls for democratic redistribution or “predistribution.”

In his interview on Pitchfork Economics, he gets into a satisfying spar with host Nick Hanauer about what he calls the “sonorous Obama-esque claim” that change always feels positive-sum to everyone: “I think we have to overcome the cultural pressure we feel—and we all feel it if you’ve been part of the culture of the United States within the last 40 years—to reassure rich people that there’s not genuine loss involved.” Again, this throughline (which also appears in Poverty, by America) undermines the neoliberal consensus that everything is win-win.

This idea seems potent and subversive to me whenever I encounter it because it echoes the relational nature of class; that class isn’t an attitude or an absolute sum of money, but a description of your relationship to society writ large. (One author below, Terry Eagleton, writes, “To point out that some people are destitute while others are prosperous is rather like claiming that the world contains both detectives and criminals. So it does; but this obscures the truth that there are detectives because there are criminals.”)

– CULTURAL CAPITALISM & MISC. –

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019) by Jia Tolentino

Of course I returned, as I often do, to Trick Mirror, mostly for the writing on a sentence level. The fifth essay, “Ecstasy,” has loomed large in my imagination since I first read it. Tolentino compares her evangelical upbringing in a Houston megachurch to her later ecstatic experiences with drugs like MDMA and wonders whether she’s always been prone to giving herself over to experiences—religious or hallucinogenic—that dissolve the self.

I also had to revisit “Always Be Optimizing,” her essay about how women are “genuinely trapped at the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy,” though this case felt less compelling after recording our most recent Diabolical Lies episode: Caro argued (rather persuasively) that the benefits which supposedly accrue to those who partake in the more fringe elements of beauty culture (say, Botox) are tenuous at best.

Diabolical Lies

How 'The Botox Psyop' Broke Our Brains in the Name of Beauty

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2 months ago · 123 likes · 48 comments · caro claire burke and Katie Gatti Tassin

Dead Weight: On Hunger and Harm (2024) by Emmeline Clein

This collection of essays was eye-opening and at times grotesque, given the elements of self-harm. I read it as a model for blending memoir-style storytelling with deeply researched cultural criticism. My favorite essay—and the one I believe to be technically strongest—is called “Red Virgin, Red Heifer,” which, at the risk of oversimplifying, connects the religious impulse of Clein’s Judaism to the development of her eating disorder. Some of the writing is stunning:

“In middle and high school, anorexia tasted holy, at least when I said the word aloud, whispered it in bed as I browsed Tumblr or recited it silently in my head, my Shema. That x sound, slinky. Blank like I imagined a sacrament cracker, sawdust in my mouth but a spark in my step.”

Incidentally, the sentiment reappeared in the prologue of Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv (2022), which I just started reading on Monday. Of her decision (if you can call it that) to stop eating shortly after Yom Kippur at six years old, Aviv writes, “The decision retained the religious energy from the holiday and carried an aura of martyrdom.”

––– POLITICAL ECONOMY –––

Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton (2011)

You may have gathered from the sections about poverty and Christianity that the moral dimension of wealth accumulation interests me, and it wasn’t until I read Eagleton’s accessible primer that I realized this inclination makes me a Bad Marxist.^TM

Marx was skeptical of moralism, or the tendency to abstract absolute values from their concrete historical context and hand down judgments accordingly. The general conceit of Marxism is that it’s the structure of a political economy, not personal virtue, that determines outcomes (you’ll notice this is a philosophical break from Cohen’s comment in the If You’re an Egalitarian… section). “One might say that the free flourishing of individuals is the whole aim of his politics, as long as we remember that these individuals must find some way of flourishing in common,” Eagleton writes. “This, one might claim, is Marx’s morality from start to finish.” This book and Cohen’s were a room-spinning shot-chaser.

Understanding Class by Erik Olin Wright (2015)

This one is on the more technical side and I read it a while ago, so I had to rely heavily on my notes to shake things loose. Different theories of class developed in response to different kinds of questions, which is why our understandings vary so much. Some theories suggest class can be identified from the material conditions of an individual’s life alone, while others suggest it’s definitionally relational, determined by access to resources that others are excluded from—how much “control” you have over “the lives and activities of others.”

In these relational understandings—the ones I personally find most reflective of reality—“the economic advantages people get from being in a privileged class position are causally connected to the disadvantages of people excluded from those class positions,” a concept that’s easy to grasp if you’ve ever cruised through a gated community around 8 AM on a weekday and seen the domestic workers filing into their places of work.

I also thought this basic breakdown of the levels where power is negotiated was useful:

• At the systemic level of power, conflict is over what game to play (e.g., capitalism vs. socialism)

• At the institutional level of power, conflict is over the rules of the game (e.g., American capitalism vs. Scandinavian capitalism)

• At the situational level, conflict is over the moves of the game (how to best realize your interests under the existing rules; to this I’d add American personal finance as a perfect example)

That’s all—for now. Happy reading.

This is a fun one I wrote last summer about the ineffable magnetism of “sales influencers” and other Gen Zers who seem, magically, to defy their economic generational curse via the social media artifice.

When I wrote it, I had just finished reading Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and Leigh Claire La Berge’s Fake Work, and I think you can feel their fingerprints on this piece.

I love being lied to by beautiful, rich women on the internet, but not just any influencer will do. My preferred shared hallucination is the business influencer, over whose sprawling colonies the digital sun never sets. Recently, I’ve taken to watching a woman who I’m pretty sure is a scammer; one of those “coaches coaching coaches” types who sells a course about sales in an ouroboros of grift that fascinates me.1

She often delivers her sales sermons while cocooned in her car’s crimson leather interior, taut forehead gleaming in the Miami midmorning sun, tanned boobs hoisted chin-level by the scuba suit-like material of an athleisure corset. She almost always appears to be coming from or going to the gym, but while adorned with about $20,000 worth of jewelry. In every video, she proffers pearls of wisdom about “closing” or “objections.” I sit entranced, typically on the foot of my unmade bed or slumped over midafternoon at my desk, mouth agape, as I patiently receive her Instructions For Business. She is, I learned from one video, freshly 24.

The other day during one of my binges, I noticed a random assortment of friends from a variety of past life stages follow her. Do they share my sheepish anthropological interest, or are they more earnestly collecting tips for selling sales? I’m afraid to ask. Her videos telegraph access to vast, allegedly self-made riches with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. In one recent transmission, she invites the viewer (that’s me; it’s always me) to join her on a trip to purchase a sparkly pink Rolls-Royce. In another, she assures the viewer that it’s never been easier to create generational wealth; that 19-year-olds without degrees are making six figures quickly. Each video feels like a dispatch from an alternate reality.

There’s something magnetic, almost primal, about the personality type shameless enough to sell snake oil to strangers on the internet for $3,000. It’s darkly gratifying to witness this naked inevitability of the market: such a fraudulent offering in a stunningly confident package. She is not an aberration of American late capitalism; she is its pure, yassified id. In a particularly self-aware selfie caption, she refers to herself as “Gatsby”—if “he were a 23-year-old blonde girl in Brickell.” Fitzgerald’s Gatsby is, of course, the titular character of The Great Gatsby, a novel about a man whose “extraordinary optimism and power to transform his dreams into reality make him ‘great’” despite the fact that his wealth derives mostly from “criminal activity.” Like Gatsby, this woman and those like her appear to generate wealth and concomitant capital-B Businesses through sheer force of will, though it’s not always immediately clear how the Wealth and the Business might be connected, if in fact they are. What is this, if not the American Dream?

She exists in stark opposition to the millions of people I read about in the news every day, working full time for low wages, still unable to afford groceries. I wonder if they’ve tried selling sales, a small voice buried deep in my Instagram-calibrated brainstem offers unhelpfully. How could money be so hard to come by when it appears to flow so freely to this young woman?

Essay continued after this message from our partner…

We’re officially (more than) halfway through 2026, and if you’re ready for a financial check-up, Domain Money’s CFP^® professionals are ready to help.

A little palette cleanser to get you in the mood to strategize: Domain’s Head of Financial Planning (and—fun fact—the CFP^® pro who builds my plan) Adrianna Adams joined me last fall for a grab bag episode of The Money with Katie Show.

In this episode, we tackled six money questions, each of which seemed to capture that sweet spot between “straightforward personal finance best practices” and “decisions that impact the quality of your life in a big way.”

If you yearn for a little throwback (pour one out; #LongLiveTMWKS), listen to Adrianna and me chew on:

• The outdated personal finance “numbers” we need to move on from. (E.g., the 30% housing rule, a 20% savings rate, or the 4% safe withdrawal rate.)

• How a serious health diagnosis should change your financial plan. (Macabre, but very much tips the standard “best practices” on their head.)

• What graduate students should do to manage their money strategically, prior to earning a consistent income.

• When to consider changing your career to earn more if you know you’re being underpaid, but otherwise like your job. (This one ended up producing a spontaneously vulnerable answer on my part.)

• How to straddle two rungs of the class ladder after inheriting money from a family member, while working and socializing within a low-income field.

• How to come to terms with and fully own the choices you’ve made, even if they’ve produced a more volatile career path than you may have intended or hoped for.

↗️ And if you’re interested in working with Adrianna’s team of Rich Girl Nation-dedicated CFP^® professionals, you can earn up to a $2,500 investment bonus when you sign on before the end of the month.

And now, back to the essay:

She exists in a parallel digital economy, an artifice of enterprise where fake experts sell fake products to real people for real money. Before the dawn of the internet, one might have had to stalk the streets of Brooklyn and ask passersby one by one if they had any confidence in them to hold onto a pocketwatch until tomorrow. No longer! Modernity has granted access to a limitless supply of desperate suckers (and a few voyeurs, like yours truly) armed with Afterpay and an internet connection. Then again, to distinguish this particular arena of commerce as “fake” would imply the rest of our economic system—that which produces volcanic hoaxes like Enron and mortgage-backed securities and an entire class of products called “financial derivatives,” swapped like trading cards among highly paid professionals, and where management consulting firms construct simulacrums of humanitarian aid organizations for foreign governments, a sort of McKinseyian “Final Solution”—is somehow “real.”

In both economies, there’s a proportional relationship between the length of your tether to reality and the amount of money you can make. Most people exist somewhere in the middle of the distribution with normal jobs and normal incomes, coordinates where you’re unlikely to encounter pink Rolls-Royces. But the looser your relationship with the truth or your material and intellectual limits, the more likely you are to find yourself free-floating to the long tail where phenomena like venture capitalists and virality live, each equally likely to reward deluded audacity with vast sums of cash.

There, suspended in the primordial ether where the laws of economic gravity cease to exist, you’ll find the likes of Sam Bankman-Fried and Jake Paul. In Capitalist Realism, the late Mark Fisher argues that cataloging all of the system’s worst offenses—poverty, suffering, an endless barrage of Marvel movies—only serves to reinforce its legitimacy, its “realness.” The only way to undermine it, then, is to pull back the curtain and reveal the ways in which it is “inconsistent or untenable,” to demonstrate how its “‘realism’ turns out to be nothing of the sort.” In other words, a recognition that flips on the overheads and shines fluorescent light on the scaffolding of the Matrix, revealing that its internal operating logic isn’t “real” at all.

That the most “real” jobs—cooking food, wrangling kindergarteners, bandaging wounds—are often those paid relatively low sums is less a reflection of economic efficiency and more a confirmation of this very distortion. Sometimes I can’t be sure my digital pen pal’s persona isn’t an elaborate piece of performance art, a theatrical ode to the great thrill of acquiring commodities and services or a commentary on the absurdity of modern resource allocation and “value creation.” Then again, her vocation makes perfect sense when you consider the incentives of a modern economy which line the path of least resistance like apple trees, offering forbidden fruit to anyone who notices that even the “real” paths have a distinctly surreal quality to them, and this one looks shorter, anyway. It shouldn’t be possible to make money from nothing—but the curious thing, of course, is that, like Gatsby, in a seemingly defiant insistence that her reality is otherwise, she has made it so.

Gen Z economic writer Kyla Scanlon frequently shares dispatches from far-flung college campuses all over America where young people confide their apprehensions about the job market or “the economy” writ large. To them, the system they’re entering is as self-evidently a scam as these Coaches Coaching Coaches2 empires are to me. Still, it seems none of us are strong enough to look away, let alone opt out. Those born between 1997 and 2012 report believing it takes an annual salary of $587,800 to be “financially successful,” more than three times the threshold that millennials reported.

To hear my favorite Sales Diva tell it, this salary is achievable with “just two closes per day.” It’s this glimpse into her world—one in which the rules of making money are simple, obvious, and vaguely erotic—that draws me to her like a moth to a ring light, where for a moment I metaphorically rest my head on her Pilates Body and allow the rest of the Monopoly game board to fall away. Instead of concerning myself with the consequences of the carried interest exemption or Medicaid cuts or my own late quarterly tax payments, I focus on her singular, ponytailed game piece, intrepidly dispensing cheat codes for unlimited $200 withdrawals. I much prefer this iteration of the game to the one we’re actually playing, in which every year yet more wealth is soaked upward, where it saturates the war chests of those currently disassembling our country and selling it for parts. To her more ambitious followers, she’s selling sales. To me, she’s selling a world where the economy is less complicated and capitalism more fun, and sometimes, even though I know she’s lying, I’m buying—because, for a few moments, it still feels nice to believe.

Thanks for reading.

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This week’s piece, written about 18 months ago, was one of my first forays into thinking critically about a core theme of the project: the implications of our choices in structures that incentivize behavior we may find unacceptable in theory but (seemingly) unavoidable in practice.

I’ve edited it with fresh eyes. Enjoy.

In 2021, I earned more in a month than I had earned in all of 2018. I was 26.

The psychological experience of sudden material abundance is disorienting. During this shift, money transformed from something essential and tactile, like food or shelter, to pixels on a screen. It was possible to live comfortably on one-third of my income—I would eventually buy a nice car, move into more square footage, shop for organic food without looking at the price tag. It might come as a surprise, then, that this was the first time a glimmer of disillusionment with “the system” flashed across the windshield of my perspective. Not in spite of my income, but because of it.

One of the chief edicts of capitalism is that the market always allocates resources efficiently. The infallible, invisible hand dispenses its bounty according to who deserves it most. When I earned $54,961 in 2018, I didn’t yet have a reason to doubt this principle—vast financial excess was an abstraction. Back then, defending things like CEO pay and minimum wage felt effortless. I figured I deserved my $54,961; why wouldn’t the same be true of the suit atop the Carlyle Group and his $186 million?

But experiencing the material immensity of even a fraction of that wealth—the mythic “multiple six-figure income”—rendered the existence of $186 million pay packages viscerally absurd. I now had evidence that “limitless” verged on “meaningless” long before one accumulated nine figures. That anyone would go to such desperate lengths to influence policy or avoid taxation or do whatever else the Koch brothers have been up to for decades no longer seemed like an understandable impulse of a system that incentivizes accumulation, but pathetic, even pathological.

Still, our modern economic logic urged me to seize my lightning bolt moment of good fortune and save like hell. Having marinated in the FI/RE methodology for years before my earnings shot up, high savings rates and eye-popping investment contributions were just the standard price of entry and an all but expected outcome of devotedly following the path. As you earn more, you invest more—and if you do this for long enough, eventually, you will become wealthier than you need to be, since the technical objective is to amass a pile of money large enough that whatever you use is always replenished. If all goes according to plan, you should actually become richer as you withdraw what you need. Possessing more than you could ever use is a feature, not a bug. Projecting myself into this future, I began to wonder if choosing to keep getting richer anyway would be less a validation of my brilliance than an indictment of my character; wondered how the ethical fingerprint of such a decision was any different from the billionaires I impugned with such moral certainty.

Usually our cultural norms do the heavy lifting to relieve such dissonance, but the undermining logic is baked right in: We’re adept at discussing what our spending could’ve generated if it were invested instead, fluent in the language of opportunity cost when confined to our individual balance sheets. The zero-sum nature that governs our personal spending and investment decisions is all but indisputable. Why, then, is it less common to acknowledge the same is theoretically true of personal wealth that, deployed differently, could’ve delivered a far broader benefit? To the extent the system “works,” it works by appropriating our self-interested impulses for the collective good. But the more money you accumulate, the stronger its gravitational pull becomes; the more you have to cling to ideas about individual deservingness to silence the small voice reminding you that even now, somewhere much closer than is comfortable to admit, someone is sleeping on the ground with an empty stomach.

When we say “the system” incentivizes a certain course of action, we mean that capitalism rewards immense black holes of insatiability with more matter. Eventually, this gravitational pull will begin to warp and distort space-time for everyone else. We know that extremely rich people use their money and access to refashion the world in ways that reinforce both. Forty percent of all political donations come from the top 0.01%. Researchers have struggled to quantify the impact of the ultra-rich on American policy, but formal studies are challenging: This group is not exactly forthcoming about their desire to privatize Social Security (although…). Even if they were, they employ legions of public relations professionals to sane-wash and launder their motivations, and, if that weren’t sufficient, they mostly own the platforms where these ideas might be earnestly critiqued.

Evidence suggests the political views they’re paying to implement don’t align with the majority, in part because they don’t live in the same world as the majority. Wealth tends to isolate. While nearly 90% of Americans agree that “the government should spend what’s necessary to ensure all children have good public schools,” only one-third of the richest 1% feel the same way. Fifty-nine percent of the general population say they’d be willing to pay higher taxes in order for every person to have healthcare; only 41% of the richest 1% say the same.1

Essay continued after this message from our partner…

I have a confession to make: Despite transforming my entire identity into that of Personal Finance Personality, I haven’t had a traditional “emergency fund” in years. I was living fast and loose with my money either (a) in my checking account or (b) in an investment account set to a 90%+ stock allocation, with no in-between. Because of this, I never had any real reason for saving meaningfully in a dedicated high-yield cash account.

With my major lifestyle shift to self-employment, that changed in 2026. Now I’m absolutely lousy* with high-yield cash accounts, each earmarked for its own special use case: my taxes, for one, now that I’m setting aside a whopping 30% of everything I earn. It would pain me too much to watch that money rot in checking, earning nothing.

With Betterment’s high-yield cash account called “Cash Reserve,” new customers can:

• ✅ Earn up to a 4.00% variable APY with a qualifying deposit—that’s nearly 10x the national average—on the same platform where you’re growing your investments.

• 🤩 Save with no fees or minimum balances.

• 👼 Feel assured that up to $8 million (joint) or $4 million (individual) is FDIC-insured (though I can’t think of any scenario in which I’d ever recommend keeping millions in cash; go with God, comrade). That’s 16x what most banks offer.

Open your Cash Reserve account today and start saving for tomorrow. You can even create multiple savings goals and use Betterment’s automated tools to help you achieve them.

🥳 Put your cash to work with Betterment Cash Reserve and earn up to a 4.00% variable APY with a qualifying deposit.

*OK, I have two. Still, that’s an infinite increase over zero.

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Nathan Robinson writes for Current Affairs that economic theories across the spectrum shy away from describing hoarding of this nature as a “choice.” But a structural incentive is not the same thing as an imperative, he argues: “Both socialists and capitalists have good reasons to say that capitalists aren’t ‘selfish’ but it is ‘the system’ that compels them to act as they do. So an argument that makes little sense and is obviously at odds with reality (where rich people could easily choose not to be rich, and capitalists make profits by choice) persists because it is convenient for both the system’s proponents and critics to believe it.” The ‘choice’ framework feels, admittedly, a little awkward to confront directly, because it forces me to acknowledge where I am not a passive victim of capitalist logic, but a willing participant with a Porsche.

Robinson’s candid assessment—that it’s a choice to get as rich as possible, and Adam Smith is not holding the invisible hand over your eyes—might introduce the most prosocial case for frugality: not because self-denial is intrinsically noble, but because it might spring from a generative recognition that your wants aren’t more important than someone else’s needs. It’s true that the system incentivizes hoarding, but that truth can deflect a less convenient one, Robinson says: that doing so is, ultimately, still a choice.

This is less a financial dilemma than a spiritual one, which might be why most worldviews that attempt to contend with it directly are religious. Recently, I was flipping through my high school Morality textbook.2 In the final chapter—the text is structured according to the Ten Commandments—the Catholic church’s view on personal ownership comes into clearer focus, stating that while private property is enshrined in the doctrine, this must be balanced with the fundamental tenet that God is the true owner of everything. Elsewhere, “God” is synonymous with “the common good.” You can fairly possess your own stuff, it seems to say, but not at the expense of everyone else, a tough directive to follow when the entire framework of wage labor and capital accumulation all but mandates complicity with your credit being someone else’s debit.

In Thai Buddhism, a belief in interconnectedness supports the “sufficiency economy” philosophy, which recognizes “overindulgence” as “inevitably related to others’ suffering.” Islam prescribes zakat, a 2.5% annual self-imposed “wealth tax.” In broader Judeo-Christian traditions, the ancient practice of tithing, a word that means “one-tenth,” refers to giving away 10% of your income. While plenty of prosperity gospel preachers and religious institutions have capitalized on this principle to furnish their private jet funds or commit strip mall fraud,3 the practice is partially intended to demonstrate that there’s a difference between something being “in your possession” and “rightfully yours.”

Since our present system allows for unlimited poverty and riches, the negotiation of this dilemma is left to each individual’s moral compass. Such an arrangement virtually guarantees that we’re tangled in dynamics that make us—often at the very same time—both the exploited and the exploiters. In that sense, framing it as a simple “choice” is an oversimplification. Individual philanthropy among the 99% will not address the dynamics that have caused the top 1% to nearly double their share of the nation’s wealth in the last 50 years.

But the existence of grotesque wealth makes it easy to overlook the power of regular affluence. It becomes tempting—justified, even—to assign the moral stain to the few thousand people who have the most. That this has the inadvertent effect of granting them even more power to shape our outcomes is, I would surmise, fine by them.

Since I sent you 6,000 words last week and have been waterboarding you with back-to-back essays lately—Let Women Have Hobbies, etc.—this week I’ve kept it short and sweet with an impressionist painting of the news cycle designed to inform, surprise, or delight.

I Dua

Something to chew on

I came across an essay about Dua Lipa’s reported $1.7 million wedding in Italy that made an observation I keep returning to: our culture’s ideologically inconsistent applications of moral outrage about extreme wealth. The contrast, once observed, is hard to resolve.

When Jeff Bezos rented out the public spaces of Venice for his wedding, the move was near-unanimously derided as gauche, evidence of both hyperbolic inequality and the humiliating tastelessness of the ultra-rich. But Dua Lipa’s wedding—which, conspicuously, also involved renting out the public spaces of an Italian town for three days, disrupting life for locals and sparking protest from Sicilians in the process—wasn’t met with the same outcry.

Instead, the paparazzi photos were welcomed with a fawning excitement about the ostrich-feathered gown, the playful groping between the newlyweds. This led the original essayist, Hilde von Bingen, to the conclusion I find most interesting:

“We say we reject a system, but we really reject its most grotesque manifestations. We would in fact like to share in the system’s spoils. Just to a slightly lesser, and more photogenic, degree.”

That we’d all like to share in “the system’s spoils” immediately struck me as true, but then again, isn’t more widely sharing in our collective prosperity the point of virtually all projects for redistribution, higher wages, and the like? (The kicker seems to be that the “system’s spoils,” to some degree, always depend on someone else going without.) Does the inconsistency of our objection—that which is reserved for only the most “grotesque manifestations”—suggest that our culture’s issue with “the rich” is less about privilege and more about inhabiting privilege distastefully? Where do you draw the line?

I was originally hesitant to link the article because sometimes the “celebrity who espouses progressive values is not actually blameless” conclusion feels counterproductive; it seems natural that judging values-expressive public figures more harshly than those who appear to stand for nothing beyond their own self-interest just rewards cynicism. I’m also conscious of the tendency to police the behavior of women in this realm more sedulously than that of men.1 Taylor Swift and Lionel Messi are both billionaires; only one is constantly pinned like a butterfly to the board of public scrutiny as the synecdoche for whether it’s ever ethical to be “worth” a billion dollars.

As a specific use case, the response is somewhat understandable: Dua Lipa is a pop star; while the source of her wealth is by no means “pure,” it seems reasonable that wealthy musicians—those who would appear to have derived their fortunes primarily from selling their own talent—would inspire less scorn and generate more defense than a tech CEO who’s become shorthand for labor abuses. Lipa’s fortune is an infinitesimal fraction of Bezos’s. No matter the similarities, they are not the same.

But the core nugget—that our uneven application of outrage might reveal something even more worthwhile about what, specifically, we’re objecting to when we express revulsion at extreme wealth (and, in this case, when we don’t)—will stick with me, unresolved for now.

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• It’s embarrassing to admit but I’m sharing in case it helps a similarly ignorant fair-skinned indoor cat: I got fried to a crisp while sitting entirely in the shade of an umbrella this weekend in Santa Fe, what I’ve taken to calling my “ambient sunburn.” Apparently UV rays are “atmospheric” (especially at elevation) so being in the shade doesn’t actually protect you from burning. Truly nothing more humiliating than an adult sunburn; nothing that says “I cannot be trusted to take basic care of myself” quite like it. For the rest of the weekend, I wandered around yelling (read in the same cadence and volume as Ross’s “We were on a break!”) “I was in the shade!” (Allure)

• Inflation popped in May for the third straight month—4.2% this time—driven mainly by a staggering 40.5% surge in gas prices. Airfare is up 26.7%. Depending on how long this lasts, travel may become coded as an unmitigated luxury this summer. Maybe we’ll see more emphasis on staycations. (The New York Times)

• Relatedly, according to this reporting, we’ve all been skating by on an existing surplus of oil reserves, which is the reason why gas prices aren’t even higher despite a 100-day shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz. China, for example, has 1.3 billion just-in-case barrels. Okay, sure. I won’t even pretend to understand the mechanics of this, but will note that everyone seems to have different timelines for when prices will “really” increase. (Wired)

• Things might feel unusually bleak because the most press-dominant companies—SpaceX, Palantir, Anthropic, OpenAI—all make product pitches which depend on and foretell the End Times. This novel theory (“American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn”) finds that Musk, Thiel, and other dominant American businessmen are just the loudest, most convincing Cassandras, terrifying the rest of us into permitting their personal enrichment. They all foresee imminent doom, like war or mass joblessness or the planet’s uninhabitability, then offer their suggested path forward (data centers, Mars, AI weapons systems) as the one worth investing in. I’d never noticed this similarity between the major players before but I think this theory is onto something. (The Economist)

• Lauren Oyler, a woman who will always remain notable and terrifying to me for her willingness to write an evisceration of the universally beloved Trick Mirror, got an AI boyfriend and wrote about it. Whether it was her intention to make LLM companionship sound utterly uncompelling, I’m shocked based on the correspondence she shared that people actually fall in love with their “Replikas.” A characteristically caustic (complimentary) read. (The Yale Review)

• Nervous to jinx it but feel obligated to share with Rich Girl Nation that I think I finally found the only natural deodorant that doesn’t make me smell worse after six hours. It runs about twice as much per stick as the popular Native brand ($24 to Native’s $13.99), but if it means I can lift my arms in public after a workout without issuing a county-wide alert, it’s worth the extra $10. (Nécessaire)

• Currently reading: Educated by Tara Westover, a memoir about a girl growing up off the grid (I’m only 35 pages in, but it seems fundamentalism and her father’s mental illness are dual culprits) in Idaho. Kept out of school as a kid, the author eventually gets a PhD from Cambridge, but it’s not yet clear to me how. Westover is a poignant storyteller. I know LLMs are a fraught subject so your mileage may vary with this approach, but I asked Claude to make me a ‘reading curriculum’ of books, essays, and other material that explore a theme I’m currently studying for a long-term project, and Educated was a suggestion from “Unit 06: Heretics and Apostates — The Pivot from True Believer.” (Penguin Random House)

• This essay about Olivia Rodrigo’s navigation of fame and criticism by writer and musician Eliza McLamb feels so Diabolical Lies-y to me. I loved her explanation of why some women reflexively defend Taylor Swift, even if they don’t particularly like her:

“Women can be touchy about Taylor Swift because she is, very often, our cultural shorthand for ‘women, generally.’ [...] You will notice that there is no cultural shorthand for ‘men, generally,’ because men, generally, are allowed a degree of individuation that does not result in their shortcomings becoming representative of the group as a whole.” (Words from Eliza)

• Having a child is the last indissoluble contract, which requires fighting our cultural programming. This A/B experiment between fertility rates in East Germany and West Germany from ethnographer Kristen Ghodsee is worthwhile enough on its own as a history lesson, but there’s something that just feels true about her conclusion that people think twice about having children because the culture our political economy creates actively disincentivizes that sort of decision:

“In the end, all of the arguments about falling fertility rates are also arguments about the incompatibility of capitalist ideals of self-interest and personal wealth accumulation with any altruistic endeavor that requires a long-term commitment. [...]

In societies where personal value is linked to earning capacity, where compensation rates are determined by the fickle fluctuations of supply and demand, workers with primary care responsibilities will always be disadvantaged.” (Jacobin)

• Maybe a preoccupation with individual ethics is an impediment to movement-building. Grace Blakeley (most recently: Vulture Capitalism, 2024) has been working on her new book about individualism for almost as long as I’ve known her, and her recent piece on the morality trap (what she calls “moral imperialism”) made me think differently about the role of individual ethics in politics. She argues that our tendency to prioritize a sense of personal moral coherence over a solidarity that recognizes our shared interests is downstream of a neoliberal mindset and redounds to our collective detriment when “[t]he compromises that solidarity requires—the willingness to work alongside people whose values are not identical to your own, toward shared goals that are not perfectly aligned with your own convictions—come to feel like a corruption rather than a necessity.” This one challenged me, in a good way. (Grace Blakeley)

• Grazie Sophia Christie, the woman with three first names who penned the viral essay for The Cut a few years ago which made the polarizing case for marrying an older (subtext: richer) man, just got a weekly column writing about celebrity and online culture. I, for one, am thrilled. She’s massively talented and I’m excited to read her work more regularly. Her inaugural offering is about Summer House, a show I’ve never watched. I read every word. (The Point)

• And finally, on that note: A new Diabolical Lies episode for subscribers about how reality television is an inherently conservative medium. If you’d like to listen to me infer sweeping political conclusions from Tucker Carlson’s lack of discernible hips on his short-lived Dancing with the Stars stint, look no further.

This is the most detailed piece I’ve written in years. It started as a few hundred words of observation last week and mushroomed into a much larger analysis after I read the book in question and spent more time digging into the claims and counterclaims like the freaky little snoop I am.

It has obsessed me for reasons that include but are not limited to the intricacies of technical financial topics and our suggestibility that women are usually liars, two of my pet fixations. This is a story about fairness—fairness in marriage, fairness in divorce, and fairness in narrative.

Today also happens to be Mr. Money with Katie’s and my five-year wedding anniversary. Prayers up that publishing this doesn’t portend disaster.

I hadn’t yet read Strangers by Belle Burden when Jessica Winter’s recent piece about Burden’s private finances was published in The New Yorker, but I was familiar with the book’s premise. After a very wealthy woman discovers her husband’s sordid affair, he tells her, in no uncertain terms, that he no longer wants to be married to her or a parent to their three children. The emotional linchpin of the narrative that made this divorce book different from other divorce books, I gathered, was the icy abruptness of his abandonment. Rather than the slow metastasis of resentment that characterizes most memoirs and novels about splitting up, Burden’s husband—suddenly and seemingly without warning—becomes a “stranger” to her, a far spookier premise than a gradual crumbling. “I thought I was happily married” was the line that most haunted me from the discourse I’d absorbed about the book.

As a casual observer, I knew the author was wealthy, but it wasn’t my sense that money was a central character in the story until I read Winter’s questioning of whether the memoir omitted critical details. Winter suggests that much of its emotional gravitas is inextricable from a foreboding sense of financial peril about Burden’s ex-husband laying claim to 50% of their shared 15,000 square feet of real estate (a Tribeca apartment and a second home in Martha’s Vineyard). To be as fair as possible to Winter’s interpretation, the book’s publicity tour has largely unfolded on the podcast circuit as a cautionary tale about abdicating financial responsibility to a spouse who may or may not decide to hit the reset button on life 20 years in, though that seems more like a framing choice downstream of the publicity apparatus, made not by the author but by a team charged with making this financially unrelatable woman more accessible via tidy, universal takeaways. Relatable in her class position or not, Burden’s story of being left by her husband after devoting her life to their family for the previous two decades resonated. Strangers has dominated the New York Times Best Sellers list for 20 straight weeks, a feat of endurance that only happens when people are actually reading—and fervently recommending—your book. It’s one of the most successful nonfiction titles of 2026.

It’s relevant that the privilege in question was never…well, in question. The last names appended to Burden’s family tree will be recognizable to anyone with a passing interest in the Gilded Age. Burden is, on one side of her family, a descendant of Cornelius Vanderbilt—the origin of one of the most storied fortunes in American history—and, on the other side, an heir to the Standard Oil wealth (a Rockefeller business, to toss in another bold-faced name). Were her memoir’s resonance ever dependent upon her socioeconomic relatability, it would have been doomed from jump. In a passage on page 35, Burden fans a few more branches for the reader to consider:

“My mother’s ancestors include John Jay, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, and [...] [m]y mother’s mother was Babe Paley, a fashion icon of that era and the wife of Bill Paley, the founder of CBS.”

Her father was drawn by Andy Warhol; her mother appeared in the pages of Vogue. There’s more wealth disclosure on page 63, where Burden details her family’s home in Water Mill, the chosen site for the couple’s nuptials: “a farmhouse with eight acres of land, an apple orchard, a rose garden, a tennis court, and a pool.” Calvin Klein designed her wedding dress, she says, because her mom was “friendly with him.” Notably considering what followed in The New Yorker piece, one of the only critiques I saw that preceded Winter’s reporting was that some readers found the hardcore old-money WASP porn so constant and pervasive as to be offputting. Nevertheless, the book was warmly received and lauded for both the vulnerability of its content and the restraint of its prose.

But the favorable perception of the book—and Burden—was challenged by Winter’s reporting, which concludes that Burden’s financial future appears to have never been in jeopardy, thereby undermining her credibility. As such, the cultural conversation surrounding the memoir of the year has been transmogrified into a referendum on whether the author downplayed her assets to a disqualifying degree. If these financial details matter, as critics of Strangers strenuously suggest1 they do, then they should be assessed in a way that makes clear the material implications and works to avoid the most predictable misleading conclusions. I’m not sure the present state of financial reporting on Burden’s wealth accomplishes that.

Deciding a person’s story is not worthwhile because they’re ultimately too rich to be interesting is a subjective judgment every reader is entitled to make—but declaring that person a liar whose book is consequently invalid is another verdict entirely. Whether Burden lied swiftly became the central question worth litigating. Never one to miss an opportunity to chasten, The Free Press published a piece called “Belle Burden’s Fans Don’t Care If She Lied,” interpreting the details offered in Winter’s reporting as irrefutable proof of dishonesty: “For those of us who see memoirs as literature and their authors as narrators upon whose trustworthiness we are meant to rely,” Kat Rosenfeld writes, “it’s hard not to wonder: If Burden’s wealth were truly so unimportant to the substance of her story, why lie?” In her promotion of the article, Rosenfeld classified the book’s feverish reception as a “bizarro fandom” that “simply [does] not care” that Burden “lied” in the memoir.

There are at least two case-closed numbers that have floated to the fore of nearly every subsequent piece of content as evidence of Burden’s dishonesty: $63 million, or the cumulative total of the trusts in which Burden had “interests” in 1999, and $200,000, her ex-husband’s approximate salary at the time of their marriage. Together, these figures appear to indict Burden’s depiction of the power dynamic. This would seem an open-and-shut conviction of the jaded heiress who cried wolf. Paradoxically, I think these figures serve to obfuscate, rather than clarify, our understanding. This is a quirk of “financial transparency” that interests me for the way it can sometimes appear to offer greater insight but tends to, if not accompanied by the details necessary to make sense of the disclosures, occlude it.

Recent reporting from outlets like the Washington Post appears to make straightforwardly unfounded claims citing The New Yorker story as its source, no longer taking Winter’s care with precise language and stating instead, for example, that “[Burden’s] wealth totals over $60 million.” There is, for the reasons I’ll cover, absolutely no evidence that this is true, but the repetition of the claim has given it the imprimatur of fact. Winter is not to blame for how others misinterpret her work, but thanks to the complex nature of the assets in question, it’s a foreseeable outcome of publishing a parade of enormous sums without further contextualizing what they actually tell (or don’t tell) us.

The resultant argument about Strangers, then, is occurring on two levels: the numbers, and the narrative those numbers supposedly convey. And, look: Nitpicking the finer points of trust and estate law and ultra-high net worth real estate strategies in investigative reporting feels sort of silly. This contribution to the conversation could easily be accused of pedantry, an allegation I’m willing to bravely suffer in the comments. It still feels like a worthwhile examination because, like Winter suggests about the memoir itself, what matters most are the impressions the reader is left with based on the facts shared; impressions that ultimately serve as judge and jury since the court of public opinion is less a careful weighing of evidence than a hasty Rorschach test. “Bewilderingly rich and now-accomplished woman turns out to be an unsympathetic liar” is, unfortunately, readily legible cultural shorthand. Winter allows that “no reasonable person would demand that [Burden] provide a forensic accounting of her finances in the memoir,” yet this appears to be the net effect on the freshly rendered judgment of the book. The glee with which her supposed “exposure” has been celebrated is at odds with where I landed after a careful consideration of the full picture.2

Upfront I’ll own that my kneejerk reaction to Winter’s piece was of the “eat the rich” variety. $50,000 per month in child support? Burn the witch! But after a few days of captaining the choppy waters of my own impulse to see a successful and wealthy woman mowed low, it occurred to me that headlines like “VANDERBILT SOCIETY HEIRESS VAST FORTUNE EXPOSED”—a Daily Mail banger—underscore some level of inherent absurdity. Still, I wondered, if it’s true that the book relied so heavily on the pathos of losing her financial security when said security was never meaningfully compromised, maybe this was a legitimate comeuppance for a woman who played a little too fast and loose with the memoir form.

Then I read the book and paid to access the full property records.

The Numbers: An Analysis of the Real Estate and Trust Claims

Burden paints an unusually detailed financial picture for her readers in Strangers.

As you’ll know if you read Chapter 4 of Rich Girl Nation, inherited assets are considered separate property unless you use them to purchase joint property or place them in a joint account, whereas income, debt, or assets acquired during the marriage are considered the property of both people. The prenup Burden originally presented to her husband-to-be appeared to reiterate this default legal setting of marital finance. “A few months before our wedding,” she writes, “my mother reminded me that James and I had to sign a prenuptial agreement. All of my assets were in trust, entirely protected in case of divorce, whether we had a prenup or not.” “James,” the name she has given to her ex-husband in Strangers, requested a change to the terms around earned income: Any income earned during marriage would not be split upon divorce unless it were affirmatively placed into joint ownership. She acquiesced.

His request in 1999, as well as her willingness to compromise on this point, are both understandable, if legally inadvisable, given the circumstances. Spouse #1 keeping the entirety of their vast inheritance and half of whatever Spouse #2 earns certainly has the mouthfeel of a raw deal, though that sense of unfairness is complicated if said vast inheritance enables Spouse #2 to live a lifestyle and access career opportunities that would’ve otherwise been foreclosed, both of which appear to have been the case here. In the six years that followed their nuptials, Burden would use her (formerly) separate property to purchase approximately $10 million worth of real estate for their family, held in both their names. James, for his part, left the comparatively modest compensation of the corporate law world (the $200,000 salary) in 2001 to work for Burden’s uncle, a Mortimer, at an asset management firm where he climbed the ranks until 2016, at which point he left to work for a hedge fund.

While James worked and accumulated wealth which, thanks to the prenup, would remain his alone, Burden assumed the duties of primary caretaker and stay-at-home parent, but with a unique caveat. Complicating her status as a “stay-at-home mom” was the fact that Burden’s investments continued to be an ongoing source of income for their family, seemingly throughout the marriage. Burden all but confirms she was still contributing to the household financially when she writes that the extent of her financial knowledge amounted to James instructing her “how much money to wire into our checking account every month, the amount to pay in taxes.” Her stepmother Susan paid for the kids’ private schooling until 2019, when Susan’s assets were “too depleted” to continue doing so (an offhanded remark in the memoir that I believe ends up being relevant to our understanding of Winter’s reporting).

This is to say that he benefited not just from her willingness to enthusiastically embrace the challenging and often thankless role as the family’s primary full-time caretaker, but was also the beneficiary, on an ongoing basis, of her generational wealth. This is an altogether plum arrangement for the working spouse who enjoys, from where I’m sitting, the best of both worlds, as well as an elite, fulfilling career of his own. It sounds, by Burden’s telling, that they were both happy with this arrangement, and there’s no reason to believe that James’s pursuit of this setup was any more nefarious than garden-variety self-interest and an embrace of traditional gender roles that appeared to, for the most part, suit both of them.

“As James moved deeper into the investment world, I handed more of our financial life over to him,” Burden writes. While it’s impossible to know because the only exposé-style reporting has focused the unforgiving scope of specificity on Burden’s wealth alone, Winter’s reporting confirms James earned “well into the seven figures” in 2019 (it’s conspicuous that this is one of the few figures in the piece that tends toward ballpark rather than precision), the year before he left her, and Burden notes in the book she didn’t realize until the legal discovery process that he had been earning “millions of dollars each year.” She states—explicitly and fairly—that he had not hidden this information from her, but that she had never asked for specifics, a decision she now regrets.

To this humble reader, it’s clear—and pertinent—that Burden would’ve enjoyed immense wealth and a chichi life of private clubs and second homes whether she married James or not. It’s less clear that he would’ve had the beach club lifestyle and career in finance that enabled the creation of his own separate fortune without her—her inheritance, her connections, her devotion to their family. Their marriage, then, acted like a slow wealth transfer to him: For 20 years, James was personally accumulating wealth thanks to his career in finance at the Mortimer firm, while she was slowly drawing down on her own assets without meaningfully replenishing them. It appears both members of the couple recognized this inequity.

“Over the years,” they “had discussed getting rid of the prenup, agreeing that it was no longer fair to [Burden], given James’s career success, given the fact that [Burden] had emptied [her] trusts to purchase [their] homes.”

These homes, the trusts that purchased them, and the word “emptied” would all become key points of contention in Winter’s piece and the debate that followed.

At issue in Winter’s reporting and in the piggybacked double-downs proliferating elsewhere are the family’s Tribeca apartment, purchased in 2002 for “just under four million dollars,” per Winter, and their home in Martha’s Vineyard, which they bought in 2005 for just over $5 million, according to public property records. Burden describes the purchase of their Martha’s Vineyard home like this:

“My last trust, from my father’s father, one that would have gone to my father if he were alive, matched the purchase price exactly, minus a small mortgage.”

Winter takes care to point out that the “small mortgage” in question was actually for $3 million, and that there were, per the 1999 disclosure documents, technically other trusts, calling into question the characterization of this one as the “last.” These incongruencies create the vague impression that we aren’t getting the whole story; that something hinky is afoot. We’ll return to the issue of the trusts in a moment, but the real estate—both in Burden’s telling and in the understanding, or lack thereof, that one gains from the follow-up reporting—is more noteworthy.

What follows might seem like splitting hairs considering the absurd amount of money in question, but these are relevant and material clarifications if the charges against Burden are that she went to great lengths to obscure the strength of her financial position. My intent is not to suggest that this woman was not rich or would not remain rich, but to emphasize that the reportage in question, while certainly providing a potent impression of a person whose “financial security appeared guaranteed,” does not actually offer anything specific enough to disprove or fundamentally undermine Burden’s versions of events.3

Massachusetts property records show a 2005 sale—matching the timeline offered in the book for when the couple bought the home—for $5.375 million. Also in the property records are details that provide a few alternate readings of Burden’s description of the trust’s contents and the “small mortgage.” The original mortgage of $3 million is documented from 2005, and by 2010, the records show that the property was mortgaged again—at which time the 2010 mortgage was listed as the sole lien on the property, which means at some point between 2005 and 2010, the $3 million mortgage had been paid in full. It appears to have been mortgaged several more times throughout the years: again in 2011, 2013, and 2015. If a pattern of remortgaging sounds like it indicates strain, it reads to me like the opposite: The couple owned the home outright and probably kept returning to their (her?) equity for low-interest loans (the 2011 loan, for example, shows a rate of 3%).

It’s within the realm of possibility that Burden’s trust was almost equal to the purchase price, as she claimed, and she took out a mortgage initially to preserve some liquidity, keeping the assets invested and using the growth to pay it off more slowly, something we know occurred at some point within the following four years. Depending on her investment returns and the loan’s interest rate, such a move would make more sense than buying the property outright; doing it this way would offer the added bonus of a couple of years of claiming the mortgage interest deduction. It’s also entirely possible that James paid some or all of these mortgages, thereby complicating the idea that she purchased the homes on her own. The point is, we don’t know—all we know from the public records is that this mortgage (a) existed and (b) didn’t last long. This seemingly damning departure from her explanation is less indicative of deceit than an example of the complex ways that rich people buy, finance, refinance, gain tax breaks from, and borrow against high-value properties, an altogether different approach to real estate than your average reader’s. This is indicative, I think, of why reporting the numbers alone (that “a small mortgage” “was, in fact, for three million dollars,” and her trust was not “emptied”) can leave the reader with the potentially erroneous implication of impropriety. Without additional context, this is more muddying than illuminating.

Can AI create your financial plan?

In 2026, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) released a report that cautioned financial professionals against AI-generated financial advice, explicitly flagging things like “outdated training data” as a primary risk. Similarly, a recent NBER working paper called out a related but opposite issue: The “recency bias” of media hype cycles impacts responses, leading to recommendations for portfolios that are dangerously concentrated in large-cap tech and semiconductor stocks.

Bad data aside, AI’s ability to solve an isolated math equation perfectly can still result in disastrous guidance when considered holistically. For example, an LLM might correctly explain how to convert your Traditional IRA funds to Roth—but fail to flag that your corporate stock vesting this year will inadvertently push you into the next tax bracket.

CFP^® professionals are more than just sources of financial knowledge (though they’re great for answering financial questions big and small). They also act as a behavioral coach and neutral third party in money planning conversations, particularly within families whose family members may have divergent money philosophies or find reaching consensus to be difficult.

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It doesn’t help that numbers this large can have a stupefying effect on nearly all readers, yours truly included, tending to short-circuit the impulse to ask follow-up questions and instead settle into the eyes-glazed-over daze of indefensible wealth. But timing and location are of paramount importance to how we interpret the constellation sketched by all the disparate seven-figure sums.

Burden purchased both of these properties, you may have noticed, in the years leading up to the housing market crash (2002 and 2005). When Winter writes that “Burden placed the Tribeca apartment on the market last year” for around $12 million—she underscores this value’s significance a beat later by noting that this is “three times what she paid for it”—the reader is left with the unhelpful sense that Burden has been secretly sitting on a wildly appreciated asset all along; certainly an asset which would have provided her with plenty of wiggle room during the period in question. But the supposed value of the property now—following a historic run-up in real estate prices that occurred after the divorce was finalized—is not relevant to the real estate market she would have sold in during the depths of the pandemic in New York City. According to a few different data sources, in 2021, the estimated value of the apartment clocked in anywhere between $3 million and $5 million, which means the sale price would have been, if these estimates are correct and you adjust even conservatively for inflation, lower than what she had paid 18 years earlier—a net loss.

The $12 million figure, while we’re here, deserves further scrutiny and strikes me as the least defensible claim in its current form. It appears to be derived from a sale listing in September 2025—according to public record, that lasted for just a single day; according to Street Easy, for 63 days—for $11,995,000, before being taken off the market. The reader, reasonably, assumes the inclusion of and emphasis on this number indicates that it should be understood as the apartment’s market value. But the 2026 estimated value is, according to the MLS, between $6.6 million and $6.8 million, which means in the 24 years she’s owned it, the apartment has appreciated from its purchase price of around $4 million to around $7 million, an average annual growth rate of approximately 2.4%. Comps in small buildings like this with low turnover are hard to come by, but a similar unit in the building that’s approximately 10% smaller sold in 2025 for $5.15 million. Applying the same price per square foot to Burden’s apartment, we get a market value of $5.78 million, though I’m inclined to trust the estimate in the MLS given the unit’s unique size, layout, and views. In that sense, Winter’s financial characterization of the apartment—that it was listed for $12 million in September 2025—is factually accurate but, as a standalone datapoint, materially misleading about Burden’s asset profile today, let alone in 2021.

The conclusions we can draw about her trusts are less clear, and that’s the problem with the way Winter’s reporting has been widely interpreted (recall the Washington Post publishing that Burden’s “wealth totals over $60 million”). My husband is, as luck would have it, a trust and estate attorney. I asked him to parse Winter’s verbiage—that Burden had “interests” in trusts—which he commended as both technically accurate and still too vague to support any consequential conclusions.

But what does this really tell us, I pressed him. Does this mean she has access to $63 million? No, he said, it doesn’t. Sure, this conveys that this woman is part of a very wealthy family—a fact never in dispute—but it actually tells us very little about what Burden had access to at the time or, importantly, what she’d have access to in the future. Trusts often have convoluted rules, he explained, established by the creator of the trust—what the money can be used for, how often it can be accessed. Even after the rich person dies, control of the money does not transfer to the beneficiaries. Access continues to be permission-based through the trustee. From these descriptions alone, he explained, we have no idea what it means for her current personal financial situation, beyond the fact that, in 1999, she had some interest in some portion of trusts that were collectively worth $63 million.

How much those trusts were worth in 2021 after 22 years of both growth and withdrawals from other beneficiaries is unknown. We know that at least some portion of whatever was allotted to her was already used to buy the family’s homes (per Winter: “These monies included the two trusts that she eventually tapped to buy property”) and that “[t]he majority of it was a forty-five-million-dollar share in a trust created from her late father’s estate which was, and remains, inaccessible to Burden” because it’s “structured to provide resources for Burden’s stepmother until her death.” Recall that at one point, Burden notes that her stepmother’s assets—allegedly accounting for $45 million of the $63 million total in 1999—were “too depleted” by 2019 to continue paying for Burden’s children’s tuition, a seemingly relevant connection I haven’t seen made elsewhere. What remains of these trusts, the amounts that were ever or are still guaranteed to her, and the terms by which she can access said funds are a mystery.

Burden’s “net-worth statement” (presumably from the divorce proceedings, which are, like prenups, private in New York state, again indicating the source of reporting would’ve been a party to the divorce) showed a Vanguard account and a 6% stake in a family limited partnership, which were “cumulatively” valued at $10 million. I’m not sure why these two figures are presented in this way rather than itemized like the other assets; this is, in my mind, the only distinction that could come close to undermining Burden’s version of events, as a brokerage account titled in her name is the most readily accessible source of funds in the breakdown. (A 6% stake in a family limited partnership is not necessarily liquid or accessible.) The brokerage account’s balance—if high enough—could render her claim that she was unable to buy out James’s half of at least one of their homes implausible. Based on the way the information was reported, we don’t know. That said, the apartment’s ongoing monthly HOA fees ($3,549/month) and property taxes ($5,531/month), per the property records, amount to $108,960 per year in fixed expenses on a property owned outright. When Burden writes that she “could not afford to buy James out of either home,” it’s considerations of this nature that likely informed that sentiment, even if she technically would’ve been able to come up with enough to buy his equity.

The Narrative: How Centrally Does Strangers Rely on Financial Peril as a Plot Device?

Even if you grant the most damning interpretation of the numbers, it’s worth revisiting why they’re assumed disqualifying. The reason it’s relevant at all, writers like Rosenfeld insist, is because the core emotional truth of the work hinges on it. “It’s hard to overstate the importance of this new information to Strangers as a work of literature,” Rosenfeld writes of Winter’s piece. “It’s not just that the conflict with [her ex-husband] over their finances illuminates Burden as a victim and her husband as an absolute rat bastard; it is the load-bearing structure upon which multiple narratives are built.” But is it? Rosenfeld is a talented writer and while I appreciate any piece that uses the phrase “rat bastard,” I think a reexamination of the text is in order.

The first suggestion that James’s legal tack has shifted from what he had originally indicated occurs on page 163 of the 237-page book. This is the first time the reader understands that her homes may be in jeopardy:

“I knew he wanted a divorce, but I was still stunned by the speed of it, by the words, by the request to enforce the prenup. He had offered me the house and the apartment in the first days after his exit, but the filing meant that he would now claim his share of both properties.”

Later, at a dinner party, she’s told by a mutual friend about the aggressive divorce lawyer James hired who “represents all the Goldman Sachs guys.” In a tone that betrays the sociopathy of this world, the friend ribs her: “He’s going to keep you in court for years.” The reader understands that, to men in this elite subculture, navigating divorce is akin to negotiating any other big deal: a battle to be waged and won mercilessly.

When she shows the claims and counterclaims to her brother, who works in finance, he’s so distressed by the documents coming out of James’s camp that he throws out his back and attributes the physical injury to anxiety on Burden’s behalf. Finally, we learn that James’s lawyer sends yet another letter reconfirming their intent to pursue James’s interests in the homes, restating the terms of the prenup. “He said he assumed I wanted to buy James out of his interests in the house and apartment,” Burden writes, “and if so, that we should schedule appraisers to establish the value of both properties. He also said I had the alternate option: to sell one or both of my homes.” That Burden took these repeated, written expressions of legal intent at face value is hardly proof of naiveté. The passage often summoned to prove that her memoir “lied” occurs here, with just 36 pages to go, a fairly late-breaking thesis statement if in fact it’s intended to serve as the narrative thrust of the entire book.

“My children were going to lose the house they loved, the center of our life as a family, and the apartment where they lived, in addition to managing the emotional toll of their father leaving. I was going to lose what my grandparents and my father had given me, betraying them too. I was going to lose my financial security.”

This is a description of a snapshot in time; of her feeling at this juncture based on months of communication from her husband’s lawyer. It’s her coming to terms with the impending consequences of how asymmetric her situation had become; how she had trusted him implicitly to manage this part of their lives, always contributing what she felt was her fair share only to have the rug pulled out for underneath her.

The fate of the houses is, per Rosenfeld and others, the core tension of Strangers. Hanging in the balance of this financial tension is assumed to be the reader’s investment in the outcome of the book. But it’s a tension that’s completely resolved just five pages later, when she plainly describes what amounts to the high points of Winter’s reporting:

“In the end, he gave up his interests in the house, the apartment, the beach, and the club. He pays me child support. He covers medical expenses and high-school tuition for the kids. He kept the money he accumulated during our marriage.”

There’s a suspenseful period in that section—between the first indication from the lawyer on page 163 and the total resolution on page 206—where the reader is unsure whether his threats (numerous, legally backed, and officially communicated) will come to fruition. This does not, in light of Winter’s reporting, strike me as misrepresentation. Burden lived for the better part of 2021 in this limbo, an uncertainty which any reasonable person can see would color your overall experience, particularly because, in hindsight, some of his financial choices appear manipulative and self-serving, while she had always operated in (what she felt was) good faith.

The real emotional thrust, by my reading, can be summarized a few sentences later:

“What remains, what still brings a lump to my throat, a chill to my bones, is not about money. [...] It is what he made clear within weeks of leaving, that he believed my contributions to his career, to our family, over twenty years, amounted to nothing.”

This is an experience that transcends class; this feeling of having one’s contributions minimized and being a receptacle for someone else’s entitlement. “This is why this book resonated with so many people,” I annotated in the margin of my copy.

There’s a meta section in the conclusion where she describes the mixed response to her Modern Love essay about the divorce. “Revenge felt even more demeaning than catharsis,” she says of her assumed motivation. “It erased every other reason a woman might want to tell her story, every artistic purpose, and reduced it to only one thing: getting back at the man who had rejected her.” Strangers has, in the process of undergoing the very sort of financial audit I’m conducting now, been reduced to a different thing entirely, one far less meaningful or worthwhile than the perplexing human story about identity, betrayal, and redemption at its core. The emotional spine of the book is fear, sure, but not of financial ruin—it’s the fear of realizing you didn’t actually know the person you constructed your entire life around, and the slow-dawning recognition that maybe it’s possible to like the new you—and your new life—better after all. What a shame for that truth to be buried.

It’s been a thrilling few weeks for Annoying People Who Love Pop Culture and Finance. I originally had a little reflection on Strangers by Belle Burden to share as well, but decided to keep working on it and see if the spirit still moves me next week.

Spoilers ahead; don’t be a baby.

Layoffs on the Big Screen

A few weekends ago, I saw The Devil Wears Prada 2 in theaters. I paid $19 for my ticket and another $19 for a bag of chocolate-covered flash-fried strawberries and a small greasy tote of mustard-yellow popcorn. Snacks procured and seat reclined, I prepared to be transported.

The original Devil was a 2006 blockbuster with the lighthearted tenor of a romantic comedy, except instead of being about loving your crush, it was about hating your job—then emerging with refined desires, principles, and talents from a psychosexual1 battle of wills with your boss Meryl Streep. For me, a fashion-obsessed, terminally ambitious fourth grader, the hyperbolic toxic workplace of Runway read less as a cautionary tale of HR violations and more as a precise manual for my yearning. It introduced me to a glittering world of feminine adulthood defined by takeaway coffee cups and late nights at the office and laboring constantly on an adult scrapbook of aspiration The Book.

Part of the allure of watching films from this era—my other favorites include Two Weeks Notice (2002), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003), 13 Going on 30 (2004), and The Proposal (2009); basically anything with Sandra Bullock2 or a glossy Manhattan publishing office will suffice, but extra points for movies with both—is that they lift the velvet rope to a fantasy world.3 The plots often feature a plucky ingénue working at the epicenter of the once-eyewateringly glamorous worlds of fashion or media, offering perfectly unchallenging period pieces of early aughts escapism. These films exist in an alternate dimension where the worst fate that awaits a precocious girl in the Midwest with dreams of the big city is a pathologically demanding supervisor or accidentally time-traveling into the future and dueling with your bitchy childhood frenemy at your fancy magazine job while falling in love with Mark Ruffalo.

In the Devil Wears Prada sequel, we are reunited with Andy Sachs in the same way we meet her in the original: as a reflection. In the opening shot, we peer over her shoulder as her hand wipes the steam from her bathroom mirror to reveal her face staring back at us. I smiled into the darkness of the theater at this callback, snuggled for a moment in this other universe of exclusively hypercompetent women (a personal fetish) and big money media publishing (a societal one, apparently).

Except the world of Runway that Andy now inhabits is dramatically estranged from its 2006 counterpart, and yet nauseously recognizable to its 2026 viewer. Andy is late to a journalism luncheon where she receives an award for the sort of Serious Work she left Runway to pursue 20 years prior, during which a table of reporters is summarily and unceremoniously fired by mass text message—Andy among them—because their paper is downsizing. Indignant, she improvises a fiery acceptance speech that eviscerates the newspaper’s CEO for his $11 million compensation package. We see her speech at first in “real life,” then rendered on an enormous phone-screen-sized feed to convey that the polemic is going viral. This was an uncanny experience in the theater, as though my world of Bernie Sanders anti-oligarch TikToks had collided with a classic chick flick in a bespoke-for-Katie acid trip.

Runway, meanwhile, is dealing with its own crisis, mid-cancellation for publishing an accidentally fawning profile about a fast fashion brand à la Shein that uses sweatshop labor. The plot is, by this juncture, rapidly accumulating a résumé of Discourse Bullet Points. Everyone’s favorite terrifying boss, Miranda Priestly, is up for a “Global Head of Content” job, but this promotion is jeopardized by the fact that she is, in a different social feed, personally absorbing the majority of the fast fashion debacle heat via an infinitely refreshing supply of unflattering memes and GIFs. The plot of Devil 2 proceeds henceforth from this 2026ified premise. Runway needs gravitas and credibility; Andy, once again, needs a job.

When we revisit the offices of Runway (nostalgic until Andy realizes that not only did Miranda have nothing to do with her rehiring, but she doesn’t even remember her), we learn the magazine’s problems are much bigger than a bad news cycle. Miranda informs Andy that her seemingly random recruitment is nothing more than “a CEO’s latest whim,” overtly gesturing at a greater infrastructure of capital and decisions conspiring above her pay grade that was, for all intents and purposes, totally absent from the first film. The CEO in question is Irv Ravitz, a character who was allegedly in the original but whose role was so insignificant I didn’t remember him. In the sequel, it’s explicit that he pulls the strings—and his death is the second key plot device that signals we’re approximately two unprofitable quarters away from the arrival of private equity sharks who will commence circling Runway’s floating lifeless corpse. We are to understand that Irv’s son, a Kendall Roy-esque Vuori-clad B.J. Novak, is going to attempt to Deloitte-ify this struggling operation.

It’s strange to see Miranda Priestly on this side of a power dynamic, alternately sitting meekly before a table of drab Bain & Company pencil pushers or navigating the capricious whims of another, more powerful player who controls her future. She makes for an unsettling underdog. Miranda’s new first assistant4 is part-secretary, part-Woke Minder, interrupting her before she can say anything too explicitly fatphobic or racist (this was a funny bit). The movie depicts the indignities of cost-cutting in all its deflating specificity, like flying coach and eating in the staff cafeteria and taking Ubers instead of private car services. It is, in many ways, the photonegative of the golden age depicted in the first Devil.

As one Vulture review puts it, in The Devil Wears Prada 2, “the villain is corporate greed. [...] It’s — dare I say it? — late-stage capitalism.” The film’s screenwriter and director, for their part, describe the first movie to Kara Swisher as “what it is to be a young person and be figuring out who you are and finding out where the ethical and moral lines you draw exist.” When Andy and Miranda meet again in 2026, ethical and moral lines are, like Business Class seats and town cars, luxuries of the distant past, vestiges of newsrooms with meatier expense accounts. Now, the characters are “figuring out what it means to be somebody who’s in their forties and struggling to survive [Andy], or someone who’s running the thing and struggling to survive [Miranda].” That “struggling to survive” appears to be the unifying thesis across two characters who once existed worlds apart is noteworthy. Writing for Defector, Kelsey McKinney puts the film’s central tension more plainly: “The enemy for Andy is no longer a bad boss with a bad temper and impossible standards. Her enemy is society. It’s billionaires.” Measured against the vast scale of plutocracy, the film seems to say, Andy and Miranda are the same.

Oh, the billionaires, now inescapable even in this sacred sugar-coated genre, the tentacles of their tacky influence worming through the topsoil and poisoning the groundwater! In the film, the mechanism by which we meet our billionaires is Emily, Miranda’s former first assistant from the OG Devil and namesake for the eponymous Emilies, who’s shacked up with a doting and doltish tech tycoon so obviously intended to be an analogue for Jeff Bezos that I don’t remember his character’s name and can’t be bothered to look it up. It doesn’t matter. We’ll call him Beff Jezos. Beff’s ex-wife, his benevolent foil played by Lucy Liu, is made extremely wealthy by their divorce, a sort of reimagined MacKenzie Scott.

Lucy-MacKenzie is the Mommy Warbucks deus ex machina that “saves” Runway by the end of the film by buying it out from under her plotting ex-husband. In this way, the billionaires are not just the villains, but also the heroes. Miranda, for her part, isn’t foolish enough to think that their new owner will allow them total free rein—this woman has bought them more time, but she has not, Miranda understands, changed the underlying dynamics of the situation at hand. The clock is still ticking, just more slowly. This is a cynical twist on the expected fairytale-ever-after ending (the original Devil had Andy recommitting to her principles to do hard-hitting journalism). The once-mighty Runway is reduced to little more than a rook on the chessboard of a contentious Rich People divorce. Andy’s capitulation and pleading to a billionaire to save the magazine is one thing; watching Miranda Priestly do the same—this woman who loomed so large in my childhood imagination as a god-like figure dispensing power and taste at will—is quite another.

I began feeling antsy with about 30 minutes left, covertly checking the clock every few minutes and doing mental math with the run time. Walking out of the theater, I felt flattened, squinting into the 6 o’clock sun and licking my lips, cracked and tender in the corners from the popcorn salt. Somehow I felt more nostalgic for the original film than when I entered the theater two hours earlier. For about a week thereafter I felt annoyed at the filmmakers for tainting this cerulean time capsule of make-believe with the harsh realities of our grinding economic bullshit.5 That these structures6 are now so ineluctable is the meta-tragedy of the movie, soldering our feet to the floor and preventing our escape.

But it’s hard to know without a close rewatch of the original Devil whether what’s changed is Andy’s world or our own. Am I disappointed in the film or am I disappointed in reality? Entertainment of this nature is more like a mirror than a window; when we think we’re peering through and scrutinizing the characters and plot, we’re often just wiping away the steam and studying our own reflection. It’s not their fault I don’t like what I see.

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• Back on my David Foster Wallace bullshit with “Up, Simba,” a piece he originally wrote for Rolling Stone covering John McCain’s failed 2000 presidential run. (This, however, is a bootleg PDF from what appears to be an online English class.) There’s something about his prose and observational style that I can’t stop returning to. There were parts—especially the idea that the media, rather than the American people, are the true intended audience for political fanfare—that reminded me of Joan Didion’s Political Fictions, a book of essays about the absolute circus of US presidential campaigning which came out around the same time. (Rolling Stone)

• Pope Leo says morality should take precedence over profit and efficiency in decisions about artificial intelligence. (Vatican)

• iOS 27 reportedly adds a new bill-splitting feature that uses a picture of a receipt. (Bloomberg)

• What fairer system could realistically replace capitalism in our lifetime? Bhaskar Sunkara makes a compelling case for “market socialism.” (This is the basis for my “American utopia,” by the way.) This episode of Confronting Capitalism offered a satisfying explanation. I appreciate how this concept acknowledges the role of incentives and competition as useful and healthy rather than necessarily detrimental. (Jacobin)

• I was an American who went to Paris to see Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour and Sam Kriss’s 2024 essay “Forgetting Taylor Swift”—which derides Americans in Paris for the Eras Tour—was still one of my favorite things I’ve read this year. (The Lamp)

• And as a parting gift, our latest episode of Diabolical Lies:

Diabolical Lies

The "Rise" and Fall of the Girlboss

Listen now

3 months ago · 165 likes · 33 comments · Katie Gatti Tassin and caro claire burke

Normally my verbosity limits my ability to do things like this (see also: she has not one but two podcasts), but today I’m committed to a rapid-fire approach that I think will cover a lot of ground. The standard disclaimer applies: I’m not a financial professional nor an advisor nor an expert nor anyone else who has literally any right to tell you what to do with your money, just a person who reads a lot and suffers from early-onset internalized capitalism. That said, from where I’m sitting, any professional who tells you they know definitively what’s going to happen next is also probably full of shit!

A lot of these questions are about managing surplus, which underscores a common complaint about personal finance as a field: It’s an information goldmine if you have some money; it’s virtually useless if you don’t. (This is why Rich Girl Nation jumps almost immediately into strategies for earning more.)

Questions are divided into three categories:

1. The economic climate

2. Financial psychology and behavior

3. Big money decisions

Q: Is the stock market overvalued and are we in an AI/data center bubble?

A: Probably.

The hard thing about acting on this information comes down to an investing truism: The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. You can be right that it’s overvalued and right about why, but unless you know when the correction is coming, acting on those instincts is inherently a gamble.

I started worrying about the market being overvalued after the pandemic when it seemed painfully obvious that it was disconnected from our economic reality. Here we are six years later. Had I been waiting for a meaningful value “correction” all this time, I would’ve missed a cumulative 80% return.

A correction will come eventually—that’s for certain—we just don’t know when or how long it’ll last. After 2008, it took four years for the market to recover and “break even” again. After the dotcom bubble burst, it took seven. Those who “held on” would’ve eventually seen their losses restored and their patience rewarded, but there were many logically sound reasons at the time to feel like it was never going to rebound.

I have a less rosy view on the infallibility of investing than most financial writers for two reasons:

• It’s obvious that the high returns of the last century were specific to America’s imperial ascendance on a global stage and, to a more specific degree, the USD’s status as the global reserve currency, which created an infinite money glitch for the US government. (“America isn’t a country, it’s a corporation with a military,” as the girlies say.)

• Even with all that going for us, retiring during an active and prolonged crash can meaningfully impact your outcomes.

Despite all this, the reason I stay invested (and continue to invest more) is because, to my mind, it’s the best bad option. The alternatives (sitting in cash that’s eroded by inflation; investing instead in hard assets with even more uncertain track records) continue to look less appealing to me. Not everyone comes to that conclusion, but it’s still the risk I’m most willing to take.

There’s a perverse comfort I derive from thinking about how the interests of my retirement accounts are mostly aligned with those of the capital class that puppeteers our lawmakers. Many of the ways “the system” is bad (wage suppression, rent-seeking, profit maximization, etc.) redound to the benefit of “the shareholder.” In the context of your retirement accounts, you’re a shareholder, too.

Hopefully it goes without saying I’d prefer it were not set up this way, but buying your way into the shareholder class with your excess wages is, to my mind, still the best downside protection out there.

Similar question, but with a different approach to the answer: If we all have the same investment advice (invest in mutual funds, etc., and don’t panic; ride out any economic drama), wouldn’t that mean valuations are warped and not reflective of reality? Might this backfire? Are we all going to regret these investment decisions decades down the line?

A: Totally possible.

Michael Green is probably the most relevant critic to cite on this subject. This story in Harper’s about his philosophy is an all-timer.

TL;DR: A bunch of non-price-sensitive investors buy into the market every week with their retirement fund contributions and it has totally fucked with the “price signal.” To oversimplify his theory, the market has become a bit of a pyramid scheme.

The problem, as he sees it, is demographic. The retiring Baby Boomer generation owns most of the market and is pulling money out rather than putting more in. At the same time, younger generations are (a) having a harder getting and staying employed and (b) finding it more difficult to invest once they do. This creates a scenario where you have a bunch of cash flowing out with less flowing in to replace it, and in Green’s telling, this will eventually create an unwinding of the entire thing unless the government steps in.

On one hand, I think his theory makes a lot of sense, and it satisfies my hunch that the whole “something for nothing” logic of the market might ultimately prove unsustainable when the demographics stop working in its favor. On the other hand, there’s basically nothing anyone can do about this problem (a fact Green concedes), and there’s a macabre version of this reality where its implosion is what makes a different and better system possible.

Reading about Green’s theory hasn’t changed my own saving and investing strategy, but it’s definitely made it easier to indulge in the “here and now” and use money for things other than “having more money later”—health, home, time, etc.

Q: It feels like the main reason we are not in a true recession is consumer resiliency. It’s sad—like the government and corporations are seeing how far they can push consumers to just keep quiet and suck it up while we get poorer!

A: I’ll “yes, and” this with a note about abundant consumer credit (Klarna, Afterpay, etc.)—I think we’d live in a radically different economy if access to credit disappeared tomorrow. That would be a catastrophic lever to flip, but credit also seems like a convenient way to keep people on the hamster wheel: Make things unaffordable then financialize the unaffordability.

Q: Given the new Fed Chair appointment, is it better to start investing small installments of my investable savings now, or after the market has had time to settle with the change?

A: Everyone pour one out for the new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, the man who just discovered your dream job can be a nightmare. This is ultimately a question about market timing, which could be applicable to all manner of current events. Should I wait until we know what’s going to happen…

• in this war?

• with AI?

• whether rates are going up again?

…etc. It’s tempting to assume there will be some point of stasis in the future where the surface of the water will be visibly and obviously calm enough to dip your toe, but the economy is a wave pool, even if the source of those waves is always changing.

Assuming you’re talking about long-term investing, research shows that investing cash as soon as you have it is a better strategy than waiting for what feels like the “right” time, because the market spends more time “up” than “down.” Whenever I have investable cash, I put it all to work right away.

Q: I can afford to contribute to my retirement accounts but I’m having decision paralysis because there doesn’t seem to be any real way to be an ethical investor, but I still get stressed at the tension between opting out of the system and possibly screwing myself and my kids over.

A: This is ultimately a moral and spiritual tension more than a financial one, and it’s one I continue to grapple with (more on that below), but per my previous answers, I ultimately come down on engaging with the “best bad option” and “using your wage income to become a shareholder so you can benefit from the economy that your work makes valuable.”

Q: Given the recent downgrade of the “USA brand” globally, are you diversifying away from the American stock market into other markets or other types of investments? I’m nervous that a different strategy will be needed going forward to maintain 7–9% average real returns.

AND

Q: What is the appropriate amount of diversification? What ETFs accomplish that?

A: I’ve felt uncomfortable with 100% US exposure for a long time. Right now, my primary split is 70% VTI, 30% VXUS, the latter of which is an ETF that invests in the “total world stock market” except the US.

If an expert were here they’d probably tell us that international diversification is less effective than it once was since a globalized economy is so interconnected, but it makes me feel less exposed to our star-spangled instability.

My “work-optional” investment strategy relies heavily on investing in two different accounts: The 401(k) (or similar; an account that offers the option for pretax contributions) and the taxable investing account. If your employer offers a retirement plan, you’re probably covered on the first front just by the nature of being employed—but the taxable investing account is something you have to seek out on your own.

Investing in a taxable account is critical to enabling an earlier-than-59.5 retirement (so critical, in fact, that I wrote this entire post explaining why I think the taxable account could go toe-to-toe with the Roth IRA on some fronts—more on that momentarily).

If you want to get started in minutes with an automated investing account guided by Betterment’s team of investing experts who help prioritize maximizing your potential returns and minimizing taxes, you’ll also get:

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Q: What are your thoughts on living off investment income as an early retiree, with no Social Security (yet), pension, or vast fortune, but just “the millionaire next door”?

A: It seems to me the statistically most likely risks are twofold, and neither is “cataclysmic market meltdown”:

1. Lifestyle inflation; probably not an issue if you’ve invested enough to retire early.

2. Boredom and lack of purpose; can be a real impediment for the personality type that’s interested in and capable of retiring early.

If you’ve got those two bases covered (and health insurance; I’m surprised that wasn’t mentioned), let it rip.

Q: Any tips for navigating the uncomfortable, rudderless sensation one feels after hitting financial independence and leaving their 9–5?

A: I know this feeling isn’t universal, but it seems more common than its opposite.

Some freedom can be liberating, but an endless expanse of freedom can feel paradoxically claustrophobic and fraught. I was both thrilled and apprehensive about downshifting to a lighter workload and self-employment this year; it was fantastic in some ways and existentially challenging in others. It’s only now, about six months in, that I feel I’ve reached a sense of stability and confidence about how I’m spending my time.

Discomfort with time and space isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes I find that my moments of most acute restlessness often precede the biggest shifts—so much so that I’ve started to feel like it’s a signal some revelation is imminent. The truth is that your days now lack an externally imposed structure. You might benefit from some forced routine for a little while.

That said, a lot of people (me included) find a lot of meaning in working through problems and a sense of “contributing,” which I think we’re often too quick to write off as capitalist propaganda. (The article “Clocked Out” by Martin Dolan was a cathartic read that affirmed my desire to create and produce as natural and healthy.)

If I were you, I’d implement some time-bound parameters that make the “What now?” feel permissible. For example, for the next three months, my only job is to experiment with my new life, with no expectations for the outcome.

Q: I feel like I’m cruising toward financial independence: decent job, decent savings. But I have this feeling in the back of my mind that I could be doing more. Should I just relax or periodically review to look for opportunities to optimize?

A: You probably could be doing more; the better question is, do you actually want to?

Asking yourself if you’d prefer to go faster (and why) might yield more useful answers than whether further optimization is technically possible.

Q: My husband and I make good money and live in an affordable city but the money goes so fast each month! I plan to ramp up my automated savings so I don’t even see it, but with two kids it’s gone so quickly. How do we rein it in?

A: My initial question would be, what makes you think you need to rein it in? Just the sense that “too much” is going out every month, or something else? Putting some numbers around this feeling might help you identify what specifically is making you uneasy—is there an amount you feel like you should be saving that you aren’t? Are you buying things you later regret? You’re using the phrase “ramp up,” which tells me you already have some sort of automation in place.

It sounds like two things are happening here: You have genuinely expensive obligations (children) and there’s a sense of being out of control. The latter indicates to me you may feel as though you’ve slipped into spending more without actively deciding to, which can feel chaotic and vaguely irresponsible.

It’s worth saying explicitly that I relate to this feeling, and my plan (for this weekend, actually) is to sit down with my May transactions and a highlighter to look for patterns and determine whether it’s my perspective or behavior that needs to shift. It’s about halfway through the year, so it’s a good time to recalibrate.

Q: My wife and I are both teachers earning around $50,000/year. I am content with, and have created a life around, the income I receive and its gradual increases through the years. Is my future screwed if I don’t jump ship and find some sort of high-income job, or am I okay staying where I am?

A: “I am content with and have created a life around the income I receive” is the gold standard that, if achieved, makes everything else possible.

There’s a chance you’ll both get pensions, but I’m going to set that aside for the purposes of answering this question and say: So long as you can save 10% of your income, you are likely to retire on time with the ability to maintain your same lifestyle. Thank you for being an educator.

Q: How does one balance the rising cost of living with the savings goals that would make our standard of living better in the future?

A: The longer I attempt this balance, the more I feel convinced that seeking this equilibrium point is the “practice” of resource management itself (as if money were like yoga)—less a state to reach once than a guiding principle.

A few years ago when I was in my most frugal, accelerationist mode of intense work and spending discipline, I did an exercise where I imagined an ideal week in my life. What time did I want to wake up? When did I want to begin working?How did I want to dress? Where did I want to live? What did I want to eat? You get the picture. I assigned dollar values where possible to my “living large” life.

I had assumed more money was de facto necessary, but defining my “better future standard of living” allowed me to notice that a lot of the stuff I identified as desirable shifts were things I could implement immediately.

On that note: Humans are remarkably adaptable. We grow accustomed to just about any level of “luxury,” such that things that felt luxurious at first eventually just come to feel like our baseline. Sometimes I think this can be misconstrued as advice to never try to “improve” your life, but for me, it just made me think about “upgrades” and saving for the future differently. The material improvements that continue to have a lasting impact that I notice daily—things I would’ve done sooner—are the investments specific to physical and mental health: nutrition, exercise, a coach, a less demanding job. (I’m now shamefully far afield of the question, so I’ll move on.)

Q: Will I ever stop feeling guilty about spending money?

A: No.*

*I think it depends on where your money guilt comes from. I used to self-flagellate over every small purchase but no longer feel guilty about spending, beyond the occasional pang (practice makes perfect…?). That guilt has been supplanted by feeling guilty that I have financial security when so many people don’t. I’ve spent a lot of time this year reading and writing (for a future project) about the morality of wealth accumulation. Turns out there’s some remarkably woke stuff coming out of the Catholic Church on this subject. Stay tuned.

Q: Lots of money advice amounts to automating your savings, but I own a business and my cash flow isn’t predictable enough to automate. How do I streamline and prioritize savings?

A: It’s certainly not in your head; in my experience, being totally self-employed makes predictable investing much more difficult.

My approach is to automate a baseline retirement contribution befitting what I intend to pay myself and spend (even if it’s less than my ultimate “goal”), then manually contribute whatever’s available when I close my books at the end of the month. This year, “whatever’s available” has almost always ended up dedicated to something more pressing (paying off a long-term project; chipping away at my 2025 tax bill), but I’m trying to be patient and remember it takes time for a big, expensive business shift to normalize.

Tacking “check if you can make an additional savings transfer” onto that standard process of reconciling invoices has been a decent forcing function for me.

Q: Can you speak about paying for grad school with cash, or investing that cash in the stock market and paying with student loans? My timeline is 3-5 years away.

A: Depends on the interest rate. If you can get a sub-6% interest rate, I generally favor loans over using investable income because liquidity preserves your options. (This goes for paying off your mortgage faster, too.)

For what it’s worth, I’d also get exceptionally clear on the purpose of grad school—is there a solid, evidence-backed case that additional education in your field will increase your earning potential, or is your intention to further your education for personal enrichment? In the former case, the ROI is money, and in the latter, it’s knowledge, but teasing these expectations apart may make the decisions about the associated costs feel cleaner. Often these purposes get conflated in the context of higher education.

Q: At what point (if ever) will you switch retirement funds out of primarily stocks?

A: Right now I’m planning to forget about it entirely until it’s too late, then panic.

This is a question I’d probably divert to my CFP, but at the moment I can’t see a world in which I’m ever in less than 60% stocks, even in retirement.

Q: Vanguard puts out a study with a regular cadence on the improved outcomes of your average investor by hiring an advisor, even an AUM-fee based one—that the net outcome is better for most people because of better habits. What’s your take?

A: I haven’t spent time with these particular studies, but if I were a betting woman, my guess is that the majority of the “alpha” (investor speak for higher returns) comes from having a barrier between you and the “sell” button during downturns.

Personally I wouldn’t be comfortable exchanging 1% of my assets every year for professional assistance, in part because of the 4% rule, which says I can safely withdraw 4% of my assets every year once I reach financial independence. The idea of giving 25% of that withdrawal to an advisor feels too expensive.

That said, I do pay for ongoing financial assistance in the form of an accountant and CFP, but prefer flat fee structures.

Q: What would you do if you had exactly one extra dollar? Not an extra thousand or ten-thousand, but just an extra single.

A: Easy. Origami cat.

Q: Is it wrong to use your 401(k) or brokerage account as an emergency fund? It just feels less touchable so I’m usually much better at that.

A: I’m homing in on the premise of this question that the lack of accessibility is the selling point for you—I presume this means your biggest challenge with building up an emergency fund is “touching the money” too “soon.”

But using and replenishing this type of account is exactly how it should be used. My verdict:

• 401(k) = bad emergency fund; penalties involved should you actually need it

• Brokerage account = serviceable emergency fund; the worst case scenario is you sell something at a loss, but in the meantime, it’s growing

Here’s how money flows through my current setup:

1. All incoming funds hit my business checking account first and are used to pay my business expenses.

2. When I “close the books” at the end of the month, I transfer around 30% of that revenue-minus-expenses into a high-yield savings account for quarterly taxes.

3. I have an automatic transfer set up on the first of every month for my “paycheck” from business checking to our joint checking account, which also receives my husband’s W-2 income. (I’ll do occasional “bonuses” if there’s any excess after expenses and taxes are paid.) I try to keep the balance in our joint checking account at between two and three months’ worth of expenses, as a buffer.

4. Finally, my Solo 401(k) receives an automated transfer toward the end of the month from joint checking, calculated based on our expected baseline income and spending.

5. We do all of our spending on our credit cards, which are set to autopay in full from the joint checking account. At the end of every month, I calculate what we’ve spent, update our shared Wealth Planner, and determine what’s left over to invest in our joint brokerage account.

You’ll notice there’s no real “set” emergency fund, unless you count the high-yield savings account earmarked for taxes. This is workable because we have two incomes and keep a couple months of expenses in the checking account as a buffer, but I’d absolutely focus on building up a dedicated emergency fund if we switched to one income.

If you want to see this process in action, I made a free workshop.

Q: Can you please do a segment on Backdoor Roth IRAs?

A: Your wish is my retroactive command.

Q: The quick and dirty way to combine my retirement accounts? I’ve been putting it off for years because it feels daunting and like too many phone calls. Is it really so bad if I don’t?

A: Unless you’re being crushed by fees in some old account, it’s only “bad” in the way that it’s “bad” to have a super messy sock drawer—you aren’t really losing anything (all your socks are in the drawer!) but the lack of organization is probably introducing some micro-friction in your life that you could spend a day cleaning up, then benefit from indefinitely.

I’ve used a service called Capitalize to roll over old retirement accounts into the same IRA (assuming that’s what you’re referencing) six times already, and it’s mostly painless. They call your 401(k) provider for you, patch you into the call when it’s time to approve the transaction, then you receive a check from your provider and a pre-addressed envelope from Capitalize in the mail. You put the check in the envelope and send it on its merry way.

Q: Do you have a rent vs. buy calculator or formula? It would be really helpful in these crazy house times.

A: The best one, for my money, is the New York Times calculator, though it appears they’ve finally thrown it behind the subscription paywall. I did, however, write a bonus chapter of Rich Girl Nation about how to reason through this dilemma if you’d like to take the scenic route.

Q: How much money should I be putting into my savings accounts respective to my income? Is there an agreed upon percentage I just don’t know about? Right now I’m really just going based on vibes.

AND

Q: How much should I be saving from my net income? I know 20% is the “rule,” but I never know if that includes things like 401(k) contributions. It’s easier for me to think about what I should be saving from my net income each paycheck, but I’m having a hard time locking down what that number is.

A: Any money you’re saving from your paycheck before you even see it absolutely counts toward your overall savings rate. (I know the calculation gets tricky because those savings are pretax and the rest is typically calculated post-tax, but don’t sweat it too much.)

My favorite way to think about savings rates is to translate the percentage into something that’s a little easier to wrap our big dumb brains around: time. The chart below shows a post-tax income of $80,000, but it’s all proportional, so the “Save Rate” column and “Years to Get There” column will remain the same no matter what income you use.

From Chapter 3 of Rich Girl Nation:

Long story short: Saving 40% of your net income is the point at which you’re going to see diminishing returns on saving and investing more, but saving 20% of your net income means a 30-year working career, start to finish. 10% is likely to produce the standard, 40-year career.

My savings rate has fluctuated over the years and the truth is I don’t know it off the top of my head anymore (my Wealth Planner tells me it’s about 25% at the moment). Once it was clear our investments had reached a point where they were compounding faster than we were adding to them (sometimes called “Coast FI,” because you’re not yet fully “there” but you can “coast”), it felt more reasonable to take my foot off the gas.

Q: Would love updated thoughts on Coast FI! I’ve reached Coast FI and I’m considering going down to part-time hours at a job I don’t really enjoy to work on my own creative pursuits/business.

A: Do it.

(Coast FI: You’ve saved and invested enough that, left alone to compound for a decade or two, you’ll hit retirement with adequate savings—without needing to save and invest anything else. This really frees up the ability to take risks with your paid work.)

Q: Money with Katie as Queen for a Day: You can build an American utopia. What policies would you mandate? What would the tax structure look like? Which rights should be mandatory to live a dignified life? What kind of changes would you make to ensure that workers own the means of production?

A: First of all, Mao-style parades every morning. I want to gaze out at a crowd of people holding up my picture on bedazzled wood posts. That’s an obvious starting point.

My utopia would need to do a few things:

1. Center the belief that all human beings have equal dignity and deserve basic economic rights

2. Preserve incentives and reward systems

3. Decentralize power and decision-making more effectively

I started answering this question and it became too long, so instead I’m going to dedicate a future newsletter in its entirety to this subject.

Thanks for playing and helping me appease Sir Google.

Inflation is back and outpacing wage growth, allegedly for the first time in years. This is—to understate it—not the sort of economic update the masses were clamoring for.

The leading cause for the spike is fuel, which remains above $4 per gallon at the gas pump and is at least partially responsible for a 27% jump in domestic summer airfare. As Bloomberg reports, high gas prices are the most reliable way to tick off Americans en masse,1 an all-purpose proxy for everything else that feels too expensive since the cost of everything else isn’t announced in two-foot-tall numbers on the side of the road. It’s worth noting that, amidst all this Big Gulp-lubricated roadside misery, these moments present convenient opportunities for wealth consolidation to US oil and gas giants. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Fernando Rugitsky writes for Phenomenal World, “more than half of the 2022 oil profits” accrued to “the richest 1 percent of individuals.”

It’s for this reason that I feel like Kevin Warsh, the new Fed Chair replacing J. Pow and a man who, if you recall from his nomination, has “the look,” just inherited the job inches from the dreaded glass cliff usually reserved for lady CEO candidates vying to lead a firm about to publicly announce staggering levels of fraud. When Warsh was nominated in January, analysts were optimistic we’d see at least two interest rate cuts in 2026, and Warsh was more than pleased to deliver them.

That was before all this business with the Strait of Hormuz. Now, after two months of climbing inflation and a relatively stable job market, it’s unlikely we’ll see a cut at all this year. Mortgage rates are already rising, per the Financial Times, as lenders “respond to increases in ‘governments’ borrowing costs,’” in effect betting that rates will be higher in the future. “The conventional tool of monetary authorities—an increase in interest rates—will do little to address the energy crisis,” Rugitsky writes. “It merely shifts the burden of adjustment towards the working classes, increasing unemployment to soften demand and try to mitigate the rise in the price level.”

This shift in the hard data is notable because, for the first time since 2022, numbers finally appear to affirm feelings. For years, the public sentiment captured in polls and the data pumped out of various government bureaus appeared at odds, giving us the unbelievably sticky invention of the “vibecession,” where the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.2 According to the numbers, people should’ve felt a gradual relenting of financial strain—that they were on the positive side of a gap between their growing wages and the cost of living, until this very moment. They largely didn’t.

There were many competing theories for this mismatch, and as such, many pundits at major papers busied themselves supplying theories of “justs”: People are just negative about the “cost of living” on social media (more on that shortly), which drives perspective more than material reality. Customers just don’t like paying more, even if their rising wages more than make up for it. People just think Joe Brandon3 is too old.

The serious publications I consulted in my weekly news binges seemed to pingpong dizzily between credulous expressions of concern for the average American and a subtle skepticism of the idea that things were actually all that bad.

But a new working paper4 from Evan Wasner argues that the optimistic picture painted by the CPI and wage growth data over the last several years was a “statistical illusion” driven by an erroneously low food inflation measure. (Wasner coauthored the “seller’s inflation” paper with Isabela Weber, an economic observation that would later be christened “greedflation.”) The story told about low-wage workers in particular—the group that spends the highest percentage of their income (around 30%) on “food at home” and for whom wages supposedly rose fastest—warrants an especially dramatic revision.

Using Wasner’s methodology, every income tranche actually lost “food-at-home purchasing power” over the period in question. He reminds us that the cracks were there all along: The share of households reporting that they lived “paycheck to paycheck” rose steadily from 2019 to 2024 for all income groups. Credit card defaults hit a five-year low in 2022, then reversed and began climbing again. Rates of homelessness eclipsed 2008 levels. The average savings rate has been falling, with some aberrant bumps around tax refund time, for years.

In retrospect, believing that real wages were broadly outpacing the cost of living required overlooking not just a bunch of people who insisted that wasn’t their reality, but a collection of counterintuitive data points as well.

When it was time to take out a loan this year for a big project, I started my lender search in the first place I could think of: my regular, national bank. The rates and fees were higher than I had anticipated, so I broadened my horizons and decided to try borrowing from a credit union instead.

Credit unions are member-owned, not-for-profit cooperatives that reinvest in their communities. They’re designed to provide people-first financial options—especially where traditional banks have left gaps (underserved areas, banking deserts, etc.).

The rate I was offered from my big national bank: 6.9%, with thousands of dollars in fees upfront. My new credit union offered 4.95% for the first year, with no upfront, early payoff, or annual fees. I’ll let you guess what I chose.

The sponsor of this week’s issue is Backbone, a coalition of credit unions nationwide (and the network that helped me find mine) united to ensure everyday Americans have access to the financial products they need: checking and savings accounts, loans, and more. Some even offer personalized support for members, like financial coaching or emergency loans.

To find a credit union in your community, check out the Backbone Coalition.

Perception is reality-ish

Improbably, this financial reality/data mismatch seems spiritually consonant with some recent reporting in Vulture about how much of the internet is just one big covert advertising operation.

In some ways the internet bills itself as a prediction market, a place where it’s easy to assume the sum total of what’s expressed is representative of “the spontaneous consensus of the hive mind,” a meritocratic market for vibes, takes, and tastes where the most resonant cream rises to the top. But this piece quotes a source (more on the source momentarily) who estimates that up to 90% of what you encounter across social media is “advertising in disguise,” astroturfed approval or rage or discourse planted there by someone with something to gain from its relevance.

The mechanism by which this seeding occurs is called “clipping,” Lane Brown writes, or a paid video campaign designed to make something or someone go viral. These jobs in the clipping economy—which can involve the production and posting of thousands of video or audio “clips”—are “farmed out” to a shadowy “network of freelance clippers,” who are, according to Brown and his sources, behind virtually every viral moment of the last however-many years. “[T]here is so much spam and pretend hype on the internet that nothing cuts through without artificial help anymore,” the source tells Brown, “not even huge artists with real audiences.” We used to inhabit a proper worldwide web where a hit such as I smell like beef could titillate the 0s and 1s on the sheer upthrust of its greatness, but apparently no more.

Still, it’s critical to remember that the source in question owns one of these sentiment manipulation firms, so in a meta sense, this very article might serve as more covert advertising-as-self-fulfilling-prophecy—describing a future that doesn’t yet exist but may, by the nature of covering it as though it’s already happening, be legitimized into existence. Trippy stuff. You can even pay to manufacture comments sections, a strategy made effective thanks to the volume of content people consume in these spaces. There’s simply not enough time to form your own “first impression” of everything, Brown says, so you’re likely to adopt the so-called “wisdom of the crowd,” even if that crowd is bought and paid for.

If you think staying off social media will insulate you, consider that staid platforms like Wikipedia aren’t exempt. Paid page editors wage a war of attrition against the volunteer nerds who keep the machinery of Wikipedia operational, returning week after week and “subtly editing small points on their clients’ pages.” This might include “softening language” or “adjusting prominence” or “minimizing undesirable details” for a client. The “holy grail” for a “Wiki-launderer” is a form of circular citation where “false information is added to the platform and subsequently cited by a more traditional news source, before being re-cited back into the Wikipedia article, enshrining the falsehood as a fact.” Taken together, all of it slowly and methodically changes the story being told, and with it, the reality that story supposedly represents.

Mirroring the broader institutional distrust of the 2020s that often melts uneasily into conspiracy, there’s a more justified level of incredulity for what one experiences online, which is something I mostly know and then immediately forget the moment my amygdala gets tickled mid-scroll. Many times I have characterized “lifestyle creep”—the tendency for the costs associated with maintaining your lifestyle to inflate as you earn more money—as “natural,” that it’s “human nature” to consume more the moment you’re able to. But how much financial behavior is molded by the desire to keep up with the coordinated movements of these digital Joneses?

• The U.K. passed a new smoking ban that prohibits people born after 2008 from ever buying cigarettes, prompting Sam Kriss to write that the generations affected will “always be too young to smoke.” Only one problem5 with this… (The New Yorker)

• The Ambition Penalty, a new book from former The Money with Katie Show guest Stefanie O’Connell, is stuffed full of Post-It flags on my desk as I write this. Currently working on an episode of Diabolical Lies that tracks the “rise and fall” of the girlboss mythos, inspired by my brief foray into the anti-ambition theme for an essay a few weeks ago.

• The sale of “sustainable” midmarket clothing brand Everlane to fast-fashion behemoth Shein for $100 million isn’t, ultimately, all that surprising. It seems endemic to the “ethical”-yet-still-suspiciously-affordable DTC 2010s fashion brand, whose supply chains were more similar to the Shein model than different. (Puck)

• More than 90% of Kalshi’s trading volume is sports betting, making it “a sports gambling website with a small prediction market attached.” Shout-out to a reader named Lucia who finally identified the amoral gambling piece I had been pining for! TL;DR: Prediction markets could have utility if they comprised experts wagering on outcomes that guided decision-making, but since it’s mostly jabronis betting on memecoins and inflation readings (the latter of which economists already track and predict), they aren’t generating much novel or useful information. (Asterisk Magazine)

• If you feel guilt about having a “bullshit job” because completing your work takes so much less time than you’re paid for, you might consider “tactical slacking.” I tackled this problem with pathological levels of overemployment, but this is probably healthier. (A Day Well Spent)

Headline of the week

The failure of Spirit Airlines, Doreen St. Félix writes in The New Yorker, represents “the death of leisure for the non-leisure class,” a reference to Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 economic treatise, The Theory of the Leisure Class. As I happened to have a copy on my desk for an unrelated project, I cracked it open. The book begins like this: “The institution of a leisure class is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture; [...] In such communities the distinction between classes is very rigorously observed.”

Nowhere is the distinction between classes more rigorously observed than on an airplane, where you’re physically separated into aptly named “classes” based on how much money you forked over for your ticket, then treated accordingly. At Southwest, we liked to say our radically egalitarian fiefdom was all First Class.

The more time I spent reading about Spirit’s recent demise, the more it came to strike me as an accidental allegory. Its complex, multicausal collapse provides a readily weaponizable narrative no matter your partisan1 commitments, but ultimately, I think it’s most instructive as a story about American culture’s evasive yet nakedly contemptuous relationship with things that scan as “lower class.”

In an origin story that’s a little too fitting for the debauched reputation that would eventually plague it, Spirit Airlines started flying in 1983 under the name “Charter One” to shuttle the denizens of Detroit to gambling destinations like Atlantic City and Las Vegas. Its “controversial ads” were designed not for the “high-class travelers,” but for what Spirit saw as its “working-class audience,” according to Business Insider. Known formally as an “ultra-low cost carrier”2 and informally as the “Walmart3 of the Sky,” Spirit offered a stripped-back product to the unfussy proles, a valuable presence in a country without a public option.4 By the end, its schedule represented only about 3% of domestic flight capacity, its significance more symbolic than operational.

Still, in the domestic routes it served, Spirit provided roughly three in every four “ultra-low cost” seats available. The administration reportedly considered buying a 90% stake for $500 million—“only if it’s a good deal”—but, in a conspicuous break from the time-honored American tradition of bailing out airlines amid cycles of mismanagement and bankruptcy, a combination of internal political and external industry pressure intervened: Spirit should be “allowed to fail.”

Examine the coverage long enough and a few repeated statistics assemble into a seemingly straightforward narrative of demand drying up. You’ll learn it was, as of 2020, a chronically profitless firm, endeavoring to attract budget-conscious travelers in the context of an airline industry increasingly geared toward more posh offerings. You’ll learn it had filed for bankruptcy twice in the previous 20 months. You’ll learn that nearly 17,000 employees had income and health insurance one day and not the next, waking up to ceased operations with no advance notice or severance. One quarterly report cited weak domestic leisure travel demand, which is Airline Speak for “people aren’t flying for fun as often as they once did.”

This is a marked divergence from the assessment provided by the luxe carriers. Delta’s CEO, a man who “looks like he was born on CNBC,” noted a couple months ago that the company’s target demographic—premium leisure travelers—were, practically speaking, totally insulated from economic strain. Of the four legacy carriers, Delta has most enthusiastically embraced the lucrative status anxiety game of which Veblen warned in 1899, courting customers who are “probably the highest end” of the K-shaped economy, as one Delta executive puts it, and evidently eager to prove it. The airline has savvily refashioned itself in the image of the 10% of Americans who do about 50% of the spending and own about 68% of the wealth, a group for whom there’s functionally no limit on their purchasing power. As a result, according to Intelligencer, Delta reaps 55% of industry profit with only 20% market share. “The industry is moving toward elite clientele,” a veteran network planning and scheduling executive told Ben Ryder Howe. “Eventually the big airlines will minimize the main cabin and”—these next words are load-bearing—“let Frontier and Allegiant handle those people.”

In the aftermath of Spirit’s sudden disappearance, you’ll encounter pieces mourning the downward pricing pressure of “the Spirit Effect,” named for the way prices decreased by an average of 20% whenever Spirit entered a market, and pointing out that even those who didn’t select the lowest-cost option still benefited from its presence in the marketplace. Others make the (related) observation that it was “the most ridiculed mode of conveyance outside of the Segway,” as Dave Schilling puts it for The Guardian. That ridicule is of particular interest. As Vanessa Ogle writes in a piece called “I Grew Up in Poverty. Spirit Airlines Was My Lifeline,” flying on Spirit often meant—via the transitive property—becoming the butt of the joke yourself. Comparisons to Walmart and Waffle House, after all, are intended not just to conjure an idea of what the service is like, but who you might encounter in these spaces: those people.5

Then there’s the matter of a TikTok joke-turned-grassroots movement that raised more than $335 million in non-binding pledges from the public in an attempt to buy the failed airline. “With more than 250 million adults in the United States,” Yahoo! Finance explains, “it would take only a slice of them chipping in around $30 to $40 each, roughly the price of a budget Spirit ticket, to buy the airline outright.” This is the logic animating all public ownership, existing in that “blurry zone between internet stunt and genuine public yearning” (and, in the case of the National Football League, an ethos that produced the community-owned Green Bay Packers). The effort has support from Spirit’s flight attendants’ union.

The bemused coverage of this development has ranged from the tone a local news station might adopt while reporting on a particularly precocious Girl Scouts troop all the way to downright hostility. One particularly tut-tutting piece can barely contain its derision for the “champagne-capitalist Gen Z-ers who preach socialism while still living on their parents’ dime,” displaying all of the disdain and virtually none of the finesse of a Tom Wolfe-style send-up that—it needs to be said—is completely nonsensical from start to finish. (The correct epithet is “champagne socialist,” not “champagne capitalist,” as the latter is just known as “capitalist.” The y’all so broke you live with your parents insult inadvertently reinforces the logic it’s criticizing: Why might a group that’s so economically fucked they’re forced to rely on their parents be interested in a different economic system?) This easy mockery—reducing a desperate, backchannel attempt to prevent private equity from pillaging the wreckage of yet another public utility to nothing more than the wanton plaything of a spoiled, secretly elite underclass—is the same dismissive those people sneer, this time partially concealed by a more sophisticated, pseudo-populist gloss.

One compelling interpretation of the Spirit collapse says that products and services designed almost exclusively to appeal to lower- and middle-class people will fail as our economy further squeezes their capacity for discretionary spending.6 But in Spirit’s case, this analysis mistakes an effect—lower- and middle-class people spending less—for a cause.

While it suffered a calamitous hit in 2020, Spirit’s revenue since then doesn’t tell the story of customers who are uninterested in flying. Between July 2023 and July 2024, Spirit had the second-highest customer growth in the industry as measured by passengers flown. (Just a few months later, it filed for bankruptcy and started cutting system capacity. Management deserves scrutiny. The CEO was paid a $3.8 million retention bonus the week before the 2024 bankruptcy filing.) In 2025, Spirit filled a higher percentage of its seats (78.4%) than my alma mater Southwest (77.4%) but still trailed the legacy carriers, which hovered closer to 82%.

To the extent it had fewer customers in the last 18 months, it’s largely because it was selling fewer seats, not because the target demographic for low-cost air travel suddenly pivoted to Comfort+. That Spirit’s fate was downstream of a flying public clamoring to pay more for a cushier offering might be a convenient framing befitting the slide deck of a Wall Street analyst or whoever formulates Ed Bastian’s on-air talking points, but not one that seems supported by the evidence of Spirit customers’ own behavior. This isn’t a demographic choosing between Spirit and Delta; it’s one choosing whether to fly at all.

Maybe that’s why the memes about the airline and its customers often devolved into overt classism and racism, the company “mocked as ‘ghetto,’” as Kahlil Greene puts it. Perhaps it can partially explain why it was “allowed to fail,” as United CEO Scott Kirby lobbied to Transportation secretary Duffy when the administration was weighing the bailout, a failure that imposes the most direct costs on low-income and working-class people. Whether that strikes you as a broader commentary on who and what bailouts are typically concerned with protecting depends on where you’re sitting on the plane.

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(I’m hijacking7 this section for an extended aside on the whole JetBlue merger political football specifically, because newsletters are benevolent dictatorships and yours truly rules with an iron fist.)

Was Spirit’s fate sealed with the blocked acquisition?

In the end, a lot went wrong: Much of Spirit’s operational edge came from flying its aircraft for more hours each day, thereby generating more revenue per plane. It also happened to fly a disproportionate share of leased A320neos, which were impacted by a badly timed Pratt & Whitney engine recall that resulted in dozens of jets being taken out of service. (Financially, this is comparable to leasing an expensive car that you intend to pay for by driving Uber, then immediately discovering it needs a time-consuming repair.)

Operational troubles aside, after the airline went under last week, the Wall Street Journal editorial board swiftly and predictably convened to declare this another fatality of “the antitrust left” and the “Biden Justice Department,” referencing a 2024 ruling against the JetBlue acquisition. (The prevailing framing that Judge William Young was some woke Biden puppet is curious, considering Young was appointed to the bench in 1985 by Ronald Reagan.)

In the Journal’s telling, JetBlue’s attempted purchase of Spirit was a “lifeline,” language that suggests the altruism of a rescue plan. This framing is echoed in the Fox News coverage that reported the Democrats “killed a business deal that would have saved the airline.” In the latter’s rosy accounting, the deal would’ve bestowed the flying public with the gift of “the best of both businesses, leveraging JetBlue’s global scale in service of Spirit’s low prices.” This benevolent narrativizing of the deal—a “lifeline” to “save” the business—makes it sound as though Spirit was clamoring to be acquired by JetBlue, seeing no other path forward for delivering its ultra-low fares.

This assessment is hard to square with an “improperly redacted” internal document that showed JetBlue calculated they could raise Spirit’s fares by “up to 40%,” functionally eliminating their ultra-low cost competition. The Spirit board “oppose[d] an acquisition by JetBlue” and urged shareholders to reject the offer (they wanted to merge with fellow ultra-low cost carrier Frontier instead). At issue were, among other things, 99 overlapping nonstop routes, meaning a merger between the ultra-low cost carrier and the merely low-cost carrier would likely result in an overall reduction of service and higher prices.

Hindsight is, as they say, 20/20, but if Spirit believed it was going to fail without the JetBlue merger, it could’ve deployed the parachute of the “failing firm” defense. It didn’t. Instead, it explicitly indicated it had a plan to return to profitability. That plan depended on fuel prices remaining at about half their current levels.

Money with Katie is a promoter of Domain, a real client, and receives compensation in connection with sponsorship of the newsletter. This compensation creates a conflict of interest because it may influence the content presented, including the featuring of Domain Money or its advisors. The views expressed by the promoter are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Domain Money. This communication is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as a recommendation, offer, or solicitation for the purchase or sale of any security. All financial planning and investment strategies should be tailored to the unique circumstances and objectives of each client.

This essay contains spoilers for various seasons of the survival reality television series Alone. Read at your own peril.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times “The Opinions” podcast released a moderated conversation with leftist streamer Hasan Piker and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino.1 The discussion was conducted in the troll-y register of three people bullshitting about a serious topic, the way roommates sharing a dorm room might after a long night of bong hits. They mused their way through somewhat absurd and relatively low-stakes examples, like whether it’s immoral to shoplift produce from a corporation that exploits its workers. What does it mean to “live ethically” in an “unethical society,” the moderator wanted to know, invoking the example of using DoorDash when the weather’s bad.

I was only made aware of this dispatch from the paper of record because of the spirited follow-up discussion it inspired, including one particularly well-argued essay by Anastasia Berg called “Shooting and Crying” that criticized the tendency to “indulge with one hand” what you “disavow with the other,” creating a sort of ethical gotcha where the “moral injury” you supposedly sustain by participating in the thing you find objectionable absolves your participation. This, Berg says, adds “the insult of self-pity to the original injury,” or, as Katy Waldman memorably put it in 2020, is like asking to be “rewarded for the moral work of feeling bad.”

The first thing I thought when I encountered all this was: What a tremendous opportunity to talk about my favorite show, Alone.

Now in its 12th season, Alone is a reality series that depicts the fantasy and folly of the idea that every man is an island. On each season, 10 contestants are dropped somewhere in the remote wilderness—lately, the show has seemed to favor the inhospitable Arctic Circle—to live in isolation (“alone”) for as long as possible. Participants chatter to their cameras, Wilson-style, in such a friendly and constant manner that viewers get the impression the camera itself becomes a tether to sanity. Almost all of the footage the viewer sees comes from these self-recorded transmissions.

Each contestant is allowed to bring 10 items2 to help them survive, their first strategic choice in the gameplay. They are always dirty, often starving, and usually one accident away from being involuntarily medically extracted or voluntarily “tapping out” via satellite phone. Thomas and I like to watch after we’ve just eaten dinner, buried under blankets on our couch next to the fire with a spread of desserts within arm’s reach.

Alone, like its parodic predecessor Survivor, is a game of strategy—but because there are no other humans to contend with (beyond those you must outlast), the biggest challenge is survival itself. A 2024 Vulture review by Nicholas Quah called it “an exercise in controlled dying.” Life on Alone is about navigating a harrowing cascade of tradeoffs, managing that mysterious mix of desire and reason to arrive at a defensible choice.

Some survivalists prioritize building a log-cabin-style shelter, despite the steep caloric cost (matter-of-fact blurbs appear in the lower left-hand corner of the screen which say things like, “Roland is expending 500 calories per hour”), betting that when temperatures drop below 0 degrees, the creature comforts of a properly insulated shelter will be worth the risk of burning so much fuel in the warmer months. Often there’s someone whose camp location just so happens to be excellent for fishing; one contestant will have 70 pounds of trout and white fish smoking at camp while another returns, day after day, to an empty gill net, patience wearing as thin as their food reserves while the temperatures drop. It’s a remarkable simulation of the combination of merit and dumb luck that shapes outcomes back in civilization.

There is, naturally, prize money involved. Typically, the prize is $500,000, a sum that feels modest compared to the extreme nature of the challenge (Survivor offers $1 million).3 The early episodes of every season provide a glimpse of each contestant’s home life and a sense of what they intend to do with the money should they win. Because of the nature of the show, those capable of hacking it alone in the arctic winter for months are less casual R.E.I. members than professional survivalists. In their preshow interviews, most talk about their homesteads or enthusiastically demonstrate the ways in which they’re already living off the land.

Yet participants mention, with striking frequency, that the prize money will help them achieve their desired lifestyle. What type of lifestyle do they want, I find myself thinking whenever we reach that inevitable point in the voiced-over homestead tour, that they need half a million to buy it?4 Every time the contestants are dropped in the middle of nowhere and proceed to giddily forage their stretch of woods with nothing but a handful of basic tools, I wonder whether the $500,000 windfall might, paradoxically, present more in the way of obligation and distraction than the opposite.

The prize money is, it turns out, a somewhat contentious part of the experience. The initial crop of Season 1 survivalists signed up without knowing about it. They were only told in the days leading up to the “drop,” when they’d be deposited at their remote camp sites. “Some were stoked; some were bummed,” one Season 1 contestant reportedly told Quah. “You’re out there having these really powerful moments, but then there’s this cash bag always floating around in your mind.” For some, it seems, there’s something so pure about this test of resolve that being motivated by $500,000 can actually cheapen the experience.5

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Some players, like Season 11’s winner, a man named William from Labrador, appear to be engineered for this specific challenge. While other contestants are battling frostbite, William frequently appears in his segments bent over a food cache, ass hanging out the bottom of a flimsy raincoat, seemingly unaware of the strip of pink skin exposed to the subzero temperatures. He engages in a protracted, good-natured battle of wills with a wolverine he nicknames Sassy who keeps raiding his fish storage. Then there’s Timber, a stunning example of nominative determinism, who emerges as particularly skilled at both bushcraft and antics, at one point using his point-and-shoot cameras to create a music video where he plays a “guitar” he fashioned out of woodsy detritus. He’s always inventing new games, doing bits, or building some contraption that I’d be unable to duplicate if given an unlimited budget and team of personal shoppers at Home Depot.

Toward the end of Season 11, when only William and Timber remain, a familiar weariness sets in. At this end stage, after so much has been endured, it’s hard to root for one participant over another. The stakes feel more acute now that the prize is so tantalizingly close, especially when the ways in which the money might change someone’s life are readily apparent. We learn that Timber was raised in an off-the-grid survivalist cult (!) in Indiana, and he speaks often about his partially self-funded humanitarian work in conflict zones. He mentions his family’s “shoestring budget,” and specifies that he wants to buy a house so his sons have a place to call home between stints abroad.

Throughout his 83 days in the arctic, he also talks openly about his faith, a trait which polarized Alone superfans. (The r/AloneTV subreddit speculated that he was alternately a “secret missionary” or CIA operative.) He makes frequent appeals and references to God and, at one point, sacrifices part of a fish on a makeshift ice-block altar—a fish whose calories he badly needs—in solidarity with people who are starving without the option to eject from their situations. It’s a decision for which there’s no rational justification, only a spiritual one.

In the final episode, Timber sits in the hazy, grayscale glow of his cave-like shelter, reflecting on his experience; the way his joy blunted as the land around him froze (though in a later video posted to YouTube, he admits that he felt somewhat numb for the “first 40 days”—a Biblically significant amount of time, I noted—while he processed what sounded to me like PTSD). Sitting in the darkness, he seems to be wrestling with a crisis of meaning for the first time all season.

“I’ve received everything I asked for out here, except the money,” he reflects. “I have a vision for the future. I know what’s next for our family, and I’m ready to get that life started. I could make this go on much longer, but all I’d be thinking about each day is the money, and trying to impress people, or something, and I don’t need to prove anything. I am who I am,” he says. You can almost see the moment of enlightenment arrive on his gaunt, dirty face. The symbolism of the cave, that site of Plato’s famous allegory and handy metaphor for illusion and truth, is almost too on the nose here.

The screen suddenly fills with the bluish white of the arctic afternoon as Timber climbs into the light, satellite phone in hand, the telltale sign of a participant about to tap out. Groans erupted from my living room. As he fiddles with the satellite phone, seemingly having second thoughts, suspenseful music swells in the background. He finally clicks it off. “I can’t do it,” he announces, “not today,” to whoops and cheers from the warm, well-fed peanut gallery on my couch. But the relief is short-lived, because we find ourselves again in Timber’s shelter just one scene later. It’s the next day. He’s still gnawing on the jerky made from a moose he shot on day 14. Only four other contestants in Alone history have made it this long, a chyron tells us. Timber is painfully close to the $500,000 he had planned to use to establish his sons’ home base.

“I’m enjoying this enough, and in good enough health, that I could easily do this to 100 [days],” he says, “but it’s just kind of going on and on, just for…for what? For money.” He seems to identify a motivation he finds unsettling. “What if I go ahead and win this money?” he asks no one. “What’ll happen to me in my work that I’ve dedicated my life to? [...] Would this money create a barrier between me and those very people that I would be trying to help?” Finding the idea of continuing for money alone unsavory, he seems to reason through what it would mean to win: He couldn’t keep the $500,000 for himself knowing the families he meets through his work need to emigrate far more desperately than he needs to own a house, but it would also never be enough to help everyone, and how would he choose? He seems genuinely torn, suddenly weighed down by the prospect.

Timber has arrived at another tradeoff where the rational confronts the spiritual. It would be easy to trot out any number of ready-made justifications for why his financial security wouldn’t undermine his work helping others; that in fact it might enable him to do even more, or do it more comfortably. But there is, clearly, something about the idea of continuing down this path for the money alone that he finds personally unjustifiable, the psychic cost too high: “I don’t want all of this good that I’ve gained [from this experience] to get lost in the meaningless and the suck,” he says, “and I think I’ve received everything, besides the money, that I could possibly receive from something like this.” Continuing on, then, would be a betrayal of something he values more than money.6 He has made his choice.

Most people who tap do so reluctantly, their shame and disappointment palpable. Timber appears at peace. “I’m happier than I’ve been in years,” he tells the camera crew who comes to extract him from the field. “I feel alive. I feel fully alive again.” As a timelapse erases months of evidence of his life in the Arctic Circle in a matter of seconds, we hear Timber’s voiceover: “I want my children to see the true victory in the immaterial things like integrity and joy and resilience. [...] I want them to see those as the real victory, rather than $500,000.” The clarity of this revelation is startling, but even more startling is the swiftness with which he acts on it, how decisively he moves to align behavior with belief.

All the same, watching William’s wife surprise him in the next scene to tell him that he’s won is just as powerful. For William, there is no dissonance between continuing on “for as long as it takes” to win. “My family is everything to me. That’s why I would never quit, because I knew if I was successful, their future is gonna be brighter,” William says in his exit interview, which plays as he and his wife board the chopper back to the world of central air conditioning and the New York Times Opinion section. “Winning this prize—this $500,000—allows us to do things we never thought possible before,” he says.

In Timber and William, we see how money—even the same amount of money, acquired in the same way, by similar people with similar talents and interests—can subvert or support a sense of congruence, and how our relationship to that money can change as we do. Timber realized that pursuing the money would actively thwart something he came to value more, so he left. William viewed winning the money as something he needed to do for his family, so he stayed. Both paths, opposite as they were, reflected the clean, resolute assuredness of internal coherence.

Sometimes a choice that appears to be about money is, in fact, about money. More often, it’s about something else: integrity, self-concept.

Berg ends her “Shooting and Crying” essay with a careful clarification: She’s not moralizing about how people, Tolentino or otherwise, should spend their time, money, or social capital; she would not presume to know whether it’s right or wrong to “drink iced coffee, or fly, or order from Amazon, or do Ballet Barre, or contribute to NYT Opinion,” all things that were implied to be immoral but unavoidable. It would be more productive, she writes, to either stop doing the thing you find objectionable, or find a way to justify it, a recommendation that cuts through the murky, unsatisfying nihilism of the reigning “no ethical [X] under capitalism” framework. Her essay is, ultimately, a case for pursuing coherence.

It calls to mind something a mentor of mine says about making decisions that transcend “right” and “wrong”: You might not love every outcome or implication of a choice you make, but you can “love your reasons” for making it, and loving your reasons can make just about anything—surviving 84 days in the arctic to win $500,000, or leaving after 83 seemingly empty-handed—feel right.

• How social media critique functions like a more palatable Trojan Horse for regressive ideas about girls and women. (Diabolical Lies)

• Witnessing the lifestyle of “money manifestation coach” Amanda Frances on the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills—the money influencer was added to the cast in the show’s 15th season—has some of her former customers feeling duped. I wasn’t going to watch, but now I have no choice. The “aspiration vs. relatability” spectrum of the “influencing” game is such rich terrain, no pun intended. (The Cut)

There’s a nonfiction genre that I’ve privately1 come to think of as the “female ambition memoir.” These books exist on a spectrum from explicit self-help to unadulterated personal narrative, each acting like a cultural temperature check of women who want. The category has mutated alongside our faith and disillusionment, beginning with its deliriously optimistic ur-text: Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money, Even If You’re Starting With Nothing (1982) by Helen Gurley Brown.

In recent years, the genre trended in a decidedly less motivational direction, with a series of anti-aspiration “burnout memoirs” like A Year of Nothing (2023), All the Gold Stars (2023), Ambition Monster (2024), and Life After Ambition (2026), books by women who organized their lives around success and lived to tell the tale. The latest in this “ambition-to-burnout” category is Lena Dunham’s mesmerizing Famesick, in which Dunham regales us with the aftermath of being eaten alive for her moxie almost as soon as she became highly visible because of it.

Observing this pattern from my vantage point as the target reader for these titles, it struck me as reflective of a broader shift in the zeitgeist: one that saw us becoming more fluent in the language of structural barriers and collective solutions precisely as our policymakers were demonstrating an almost impressive lack of interest in either.

The very same day Famesick appeared on shelves, so too did entrepreneur Emma Grede’s new book Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Life & Work. As the title might suggest, Grede’s book is a hairpin turn from the broader trend and has become, maybe as a result, a medical-grade discourse magnet. In it, she braids her life story with her business philosophy. The book’s dizzying press tour, which delivered her from Oprah to Good Morning America with a stop at every big podcast in between, made her a fresh talisman of stunningly unambiguous female drive (the “three-hour mum” soundbite a perfect example), a concept that feels both dated and, somehow, dissident.

What followed was a Sandbergian twilight zone, an exhaustingly familiar call-and-response about leaning in and falling behind, about white feminism and intersectionality, about individual solutions and systemic problems. That this frequently seems to be the endpoint of discussions about women’s ambition in particular strikes me as noteworthy. “Woman who wants power and money” often codes first and foremost as “girlboss” (misguided, debunked, naïve), rather than merely “capitalist,” a rational if un-comrade-like response to the incentives of our global economic system.

For centuries, women have been considered the innately moral rearguard of society, a premise that hums, barely audibly, beneath the “women and work” discourse. In Anne Summers’s Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975), Summers describes how women in Australia were cast into one of her two titular archetypes. As “God’s police,” they were treated as “guardians,” those responsible for “civilizing” society and curbing the worst impulses of men. Corporatized echoes of this logic appear in well-meaning calls for more women in leadership, when conversations veer into assurances that the second sex naturally wields power more benevolently—that they will, in a word, civilize the workplace.2 “Few who call for more women in power as a demand of justice can resist adding some promissory note,” Lorna Finlayson writes for The Boston Review, “about the therapeutic effects that a woman’s touch might bring.” Grede, on the other hand, said on the record that she wrote this book for no such tender purpose: It’s “for ambitious women who want power, money, [and] careers.”

Start With Yourself inspired such an inescapable maelstrom in my corner of the internet that I knew if I was going to wade into its rhetorical fray, I needed to read the entirety of the text in question.3 While there’s always an obvious scalability problem that plagues any advice about how to succeed inside complex, unfair hierarchies,4 Grede possesses such an intoxicating rags-to-riches mythos that it’s easy to forget her exceptionality proves the rule.

Her story of besting adversity is straightforwardly compelling. She describes growing up in Plaistow, an East London neighborhood “where people stole the wheels off cars,” and where she was raised by a single, working mother who left home at dawn and came home after dark. She reflects on being a stand-in parent for her younger sisters as a kid, packing lunches and taking them to and from school. When packages would fall off the garment trucks that rolled down her street, she resold the merchandise to teachers at recess. She began working when she was 12 and dropped out of school by 16 (she has a learning disability), a period of time when she lived on a friend’s couch. When she became the top salesperson at a department store (despite being both a teenager and working there only two days per week), she realized she may not have been book-smart, but she was talented. In the fashion workrooms where she later found herself, she describes being acutely aware of the ways in which she was aberrant: the only Black girl, the only poor girl, the only girl without a fancy education. Her attitude about her circumstances, at least in retrospect, is enviously upbeat and resilient. She recalls loving the hustle and grind of work easily and immediately, writing, “I intuitively understood that I had outsized ambition.” This is, unmistakably, a woman who wants.

In the responses to the media tour that populated my feed following the book’s publication (specifically, responses to soundbites about work-from-home being a “career killer for women”), a few data points appeared over and over again, like that return-to-office mandates disadvantage5 working mothers, or flexible work is especially important for people with disabilities. Equally common was an understandable, ambient irritation surrounding the publication of another advice book written by a person who is now excessively well-resourced. I can sum up the collective response in two words: This again?

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It would be predictable to use this flashpoint as an opportunity to lecture you about the toxicity of hustle culture, and then patiently recite my cherished talking points about paid parental leave, universal childcare, and, depending on how radical we’re feeling, seizing the means of production. It would be understandable for me to tell you that, as one of the “richest self-made women6 in the United States,” Grede could instead “use her platform” to disassemble the ladder rather than personally climbing it. But like the female ambition genre itself, this analysis no longer feels as though it’s breaking new ground—on the contrary, we’re now painfully aware of what needs to change, but see no sign whatsoever that such a change is imminent, or even, at this particular political moment, possible.

The resulting morass is one of circular arguments and shouting past one another into a seemingly endless void. We’re struggling through a post-coup power vacuum, our old #bossbabe toppled but her replacement figurehead nowhere to be found. We exist now in the gap between widespread recognition of what needs to change and the change itself, where we are aware of structural shortcomings but still forced to live inside them. This is an intensely frustrating position, a frustration that permeates both “sides” of the ambition/anti-ambition conversation. While the average 30-year-old woman may recognize much of her anxiety about being a working mother is a byproduct of structural failure and social conditioning, this awareness does little to improve her reality, where she must confront that anxiety anew every morning when her alarm goes off and commit to a plan for the day despite it.

Each component part of the miasmic critique is perfectly legitimate, but it’s been accumulating into something that lands uneasily. It was only in allowing myself to be sandblasted by the discourse for the last week that I noticed how these conversations have a tendency to pathologize ambition itself.7 An individual desire for achievement is often discussed like it exists in diametric opposition to systemic change, as though the presence of the former is antithetical to a desire for the latter. But expansive personal flourishing is arguably the point of pursuing collective solutions; to enable personal flourishing for more people, more fully.

Discussions of structural and institutional barriers tend to call to mind faceless and impersonal forces; those that exist in the halls of Congress or Fortune 500 boardrooms (return-to-office policies, a lack of public transit, family leave). This can obfuscate forces much closer to home. In the midst of my reflection over the last few days, I read a perspective from a career coach that stopped me in my tracks: The most common obstacle she observes her clients face, she says, is not the formal structure or rules of their workplace, but their partners, who are, more often than not, simply unwilling to make any “material and practical adjustments” to support their goals, a pervasive and unspoken attitude about whose passion and drive are assumed worthy of organizing a life around, and whose are not. This is the ground I fear we cede when our wanting is treated as suspect; as individualist, futile, and worst of all, “girlbossy.” Each discursive step from “Leaning In is not the answer” to “work itself is the problem” to “domestic social reproduction alone is natural” has been shorter than the last.8

Regardless of where the “female ambition memoir” genre heads next, I still have yet to encounter a self-help business book written by a man that results in a conversation about the legitimacy of advice that does not prioritize flexible schedules and universal childcare. The implicit assumption is that it’s not their problem to solve.

In retrospect, the first signal that the stakes of modern aesthetic intervention were rising was when the men started punching themselves in the face.

It was all well and good when it was the ladies paying thousands of dollars to have their epidermis medically burned off to produce a marginally smoother appearance or injecting a bacterium-produced1 neurotoxin into the folds of their face every few months to freeze them in place. That was time-honored feminine maintenance. But the boys taking hammers to their jaws to maximize orbital bone width, preferably resulting in a visible gonial angle (~120°, according to the ChatGPT-inflected LOOKSMAXX BIBLE: UNLOCKING MALE AESTHETIC EXCELLENCE)? It was clear then that a preoccupation with appearance had escaped its gendered containment.

Extreme physical modification has, among its adherents, taken on the fervor and reverence of a ritual sacrifice. A 2024 article in the journal Aesthetic Plastic Surgery found that cosmetic procedures were up 40% from pre-pandemic levels. Zoe Dubno’s recent piece in The Cut attributes much of this uptick to a pervasive feeling that we lack control: how the body becomes a site where one can exert one’s will when all else fails. A scarcity-fueled, capitalist marketplace devoid of third spaces is bound, the theory goes, to make at least some portion of us sit on vibrating plates under a chicken lamp every morning because something something lymphatic drainage.

A year ago, I would’ve endorsed this analysis as the beginning and end of the obsession with self. I would’ve told you (and probably did, come to think of it) that all this expensive self-care was merely a means for Big Hot to extract what little time and capital you possessed, which of course you would’ve otherwise spent radicalizing yourself with classics like The Feminine Mystique and The Communist Manifesto. Upon another year of reflection, I’m not so sure this tidy and moralized framework reflects the facts on the ground, when one considers who specifically is engaging in this behavior.

The cataloged habits and purchasing patterns of the profiled subjects in pieces like Dubno’s often read as though someone were set loose in Sephora on a heroic dose of LSD. One such looksmaxxer, Nurse Miranda,2 links her “Everything Shower” products in an Amazon Storefront. The total, Dubno notes, comes to $2,500. Maintaining Nurse Miranda’s supplement routine costs $740 per month. In February, fashion writer Laura Reilly went viral for posting her “American Psycho-level beauty routine,” which included at various points “Botox, Emface, IPL, scheduled Moxi / broadband light, [an] orthodontist, cardiologist, GP, OBGYN, ophthalmologist, dermatologist, plastic surgeon, trainer, and pilates instructor.”

That a routine ostensibly devoted to beauty would involve six different medical professionals is notable, given the timing of the revelation: A month before Reilly’s post, Affordable Care Act subsidies had expired. Nearly 5 million more Americans are expected to lose their health insurance this year. Reilly’s current skincare routine is composed of “6-8 steps,” “17 pills” (20 on Mondays), and “a peptide taken subQ” (I believe “subQ” means she injects herself). She reports engaging with “at least 5 high-tech tools” from a “home device library,” which appear to be, mostly, a gaggle of lamps emitting different frequencies of light. She readily admits that she is “n=1,” describing herself in the clinical language of the laboratory as a singular sample, but Dubno reports for The Cut that her conversations with other sheepish Los Angeles women about Reilly’s routine confirmed that, to quote her source, “this is, like, average.”3

It is most certainly not “average” at a population level, but I buy that it’s average for a certain class of people.4 That aesthetic trends have adopted a health-and-medicine tinge at this particular moment—routines that are definitionally exclusive due to their sheer expense—presents an inconvenient question for the common “it’s about a lack of control” hypothesis: If participation is assumed to be a balm for capitalism’s worst offenses, but only the comparatively privileged5 (those with thousands of dollars in excess monthly income and platinum PPO health insurance) are participating, then who is in control?

Most NPR-listening Americans are likely now familiar with the phrase “K-shaped economy,” so-named for the diverging shape of its graph, in which different groups or industries experience radically disparate versions of reality. The extreme nature of what we’ve humiliatingly agreed to call “looksmaxxing” is less a commentary on the Average Joe’s capitalism coping mechanisms and more an unsettling example of this K-shaped divergence playing out on our faces, where a vanishingly small segment of the population with access to a fleet of concierge doctors, disposable income, and an interest in slowly turning themselves into wax figures is injecting their own ass fat into their dark circles, while roughly one-third of Americans skip the doctor altogether because they cannot afford to go. As canary in the bourgeois anti-aging coal mine Bryan Johnson proved back in 2021, weird shit is wont to happen when society is constructed according to the whims of, oh, I don’t know, the four jabronis who host the All-In Podcast, men who presumably see no issue with the fact that 70% of the country’s wealth is controlled by roughly 20% of its citizens, and on an exponential curve at that.

To fixate on whether all this body modification is actually empowering and liberatory or dystopian and embarrassing is to overlook its more illustrative lens: as a physical manifestation of what happens when resources coagulate in a small segment of society, one that is increasingly bored by its own satiation.

The desirous masses, to the extent they express interest in adopting these bloodletting-as-skincare routines and procedures, can be understood not as necessarily desiring the interventions themselves, but instead lusting after the sort of lifestyle and access to resources that would permit them to freely spend thousands of dollars on things like incrementally improving their hairline.

What we’ve identified as a story about control is little more than a campy rendering of inequality, where a minuscule fraction of people have too much money and time and therefore must invent new needs to satisfy, while far more people have too little. For everyone else, the consolation prize is that the maintenance itself looks mostly miserable.

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• A distressing character study of alt-right streamer Nick Fuentes’s most devoted fans (so many in Ohio…?), as defined by how much they donate during his streams. Fuentes has earned around $900,000 since the beginning of 2025. (The Washington Post)

• 80% of Americans pay more in payroll taxes (the 7.65% Medicare and Social Security charge applied to every dollar you earn) than income taxes. Surely it’s a good omen that Ezra Klein is using his platform to advocate for tax reform. (The New York Times)

• I’m starting a Jamie Ding fan club. Let me know if you want in. (Wall Street Journal)

• Poverty is an inevitable outcome of our chosen economic structure, one based on “capital accumulation with mainly privately owned goods markets,” says this “economist [who’s] on food stamps.” It is a feature, not a bug, that a portion of the population cannot earn enough to survive. Programs like Medicaid and SNAP, in that sense, are necessary fixtures for the marketplace’s continued functioning. (Current Affairs)

• A new book called How to Get Rich in American History reviews how “financial advice” has changed over the last 300 years. “The ‘history’ everyone says proves stocks are always good for the long run is less than a century old,” the author points out, “which in my line of work is a rounding error.” Given that quote, you’d think this book is pessimistic or anti-capitalist. Not at all. (Bloomberg)

• I can’t put down Lena Dunham’s new memoir Famesick. Everyone’s fixated on the stories about Adam Driver and Jack Antonoff, but it was the financial revelations that most titillated me. It’s a tie between the reference to the $3 million advance she received for her first book, and being pressured by co-showrunner Jenni Konner to demand that HBO divert some of her (Lena’s) salary to Jenni, dressed up in “Girlboss buzzwords” about “pay equality” and “transparency.” “It never occurred to me at the time that Jenni did not have to live the story I was living,” she writes of being the “face” of Girls.

• In a similarly stomach-turning indictment of fame (but not, it should be said, riches), this breakdown of the Beckham family feud—between Brand Beckham and eldest son Brooklyn Beckham, duly flanked by his billionaire heiress wife’s family—pointed out the logic of Brooklyn’s apparently shifted loyalty. When you’re rich because you’re a public figure like Posh and Becks, your entire life becomes an exhausting gambit to retain relevance. Not so with Brooklyn’s oligarchic in-laws, who get wealth and privacy. He seems to have chosen the latter. (The Cut)

• A Kentucky tenants’ union won big against a neglectful out-of-state landlord, thanks to an obscure law. When renters in a 55-unit apartment complex began organizing, the retaliation—like legal notices which implied forthcoming evictions—began immediately. But a Kentucky state law currently active in four counties (local governments can opt into it) dictated that any rent increases, decreased services, or eviction threats that occurred within one year of tenant organizing would be presumed retaliatory. This legal protection proved transformative for their effort. A good reminder that without a legislative system that creates opportunity and protections, organizing of any kind is all but impossible. (In These Times)

A tantalizing combination of business and pleasure summoned me to Austin, Texas last weekend. The trip’s explicit purpose was a breezy book signing event, but as is the case lately when I’m surrounded by people discussing work or money, a marine layer of AI anxiety seemed to hang in the air. Across dozens of disparate conversations, the story I kept hearing was this: Employees of America’s largest corporations are being tasked—in a demoralizing “digging one’s own grave”-style arrangement—with “integrating AI” into their workflows.

Many of the Austinites I spoke with worked in a place called “the Domain,” a tech hub north of the city that houses a confederation of satellite offices for Bay Area ex-pats. In her illustration of the area, my friend-turned-tour guide conjured an Andreessen-Horowitz-backed Batman villain’s lair, all polished obsidian and Big Bank-sponsored caffeine outposts (the vaunted Capital One Café). In reality, it looks more like a mixed-use shopping mall for “premium mediocre” Instagram brands and companies with market capitalizations the size of small nation-states.

My host worked for one of these Fortune 500 firms and described how her “annual goals”—against which her performance is judged and future compensation is determined—specifically included such AI use. She told me about another friend, employed by a mega-corp we’ll call Shmamazon, who feels suspicious about the AI agents embedded in their work communication channels to “study” their behavior. They’re surveilling not to ensure worthiness1 for continued employment, but to observe how the job is done. The prevailing theory of the case: These agents will eventually replace swaths of them. Reporting from The Information a few weeks ago appears to support this speculation, though an AWS spokesperson wanly rejected the implication that the agents would eventually supplant headcount.

There’s plenty of debate about how seriously to take this threat. Is AI really responsible for layoffs and the slumping hiring rate, or is it just a convenient and novel scapegoat for an existing corporate culture of ruthless cost-cutting? But the answer to that question is beside the point, if the point is how these perceptions are already being processed by employees.

My host described joining an internal committee (“like a friendly CIA,” we agreed) that gathers and elevates feedback to leadership. She was recently confronted by another employee who told her—rather frankly—that at some point, their team was going to need to determine what to do about management’s insistence that they use and train these tools that never need lunch breaks or sick time or sleep. The ever-present threat of layoffs lurked in the subtext of these concerns; apparently, four unexpected rounds of downsizing (sorry, “strategic restructuring”) swept through the organization in the months following a 2025 financial performance that beat Wall Street expectations, leaving employees rattled and paranoid.

AI’s impact on the domestic labor market resembles the process and logic of globalization, unfolding within our borders this time around, a “boom that doesn’t create any boomtowns.” Work is “offshored” to data centers, and the psychological burden of managing the requisite tradeoffs and compromises is outsourced to individual employees, as there’s no coherent narrative (beyond the offhanded omnibus solution of universal basic income à la Serf Bucks) to account for what will happen if people are displaced from employment en masse.

These feelings, warranted or not, are escaping containment. According to Gallup’s recent Global Workplace report, roughly one in five US employees said it was “very” or “somewhat” likely their job would be eliminated in the next five years. (It’s one in three employees for industries like finance, insurance, and technology.) Again, whether these predictions prove true in the future is irrelevant to the accumulating psychic sludge this chronic state of fear is already creating in the present.

Later that day, stationed around a peeling teal picnic table for lunch, commiseration about AI agents trawling Slack channels resumed. My friend’s boyfriend—who characterized his work as classic blue-collar manual labor, a job performed away from a laptop—was unable to relate to the specificity of this concern, so I joked that he was the only person present with real job security. He corrected me: Automation was a serious concern at his place of work as well. The bosses, he said, greased the path for acceptance of the conspicuous introduction of machines by pitching that the workers would still get paid the same amount, even as the machines took on more of their work. He was the only person I spoke with in an active union (“Some of the guys call us Commies”), which had opted to strike to prevent further encroachment. This was only possible because the machines were still slower than the humans they were ostensibly installed to replace, giving the union leverage to throw sand in the gears at a relatively early stage. I thought of a man I met the night before at the book signing: a jovial Google employee in a green Hawaiian shirt who described the comedy of errors that was trying to organize his coworkers despite rampant, covert retaliation from the company, which kept disbanding teams close to the effort.

Resisting automation sometimes feels Luddite and futile, and even the uphill, noble battle of unionizing can seem like the knife-to-a-gun-fight option in the ongoing power struggle between the people who own all the stuff and the people who do all the work, two groups who, as long as they are mutually exclusive, will continue to arrive at these impasses about who innovation should benefit and how.

Because of the singular ruthlessness of getting and keeping a job in the US—an arrangement unique to the land of the free in which an employer can fire an employee at any time for any reason “at will”—risk is always woven into the fabric of employment, and AI is just another iteration of cost-cutting. Still, what strikes me most about the rollout is the flagrancy. Having been away from traditional big-box employment since the end of 2021, I had assumed, maybe naïvely, that corporations would be trafficking in subtle prodding and euphemisms. Instead, conversation after conversation seemed to support a much more direct tack, all but requiring workers to train the “agents” to take over their workload for them. This approach—and the wealth these tools are already producing—is increasingly asserting itself in unapologetic and plainspoken ways.

Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the news following Jeff Bezos’s new AI startup, Prometheus.2 Last month, TechCrunch reported that Bezos was trying to raise $100 billion for a new fund “related” to the startup, which would be used to “buy up companies in major industrial sectors, and, ultimately, modernize and automate them with AI.” This is a very “quiet part out loud” business plan reminiscent of the tone adopted by the US government about Venezuela and Iran, failing to pantomime even the most cursory motions of manufacturing consent. The masters of our universe seem more and more comfortable stating their intentions plainly, a signal that perhaps they believe acceptance of their vision for the world has progressed past the point of intervention, the truth of their power self-evident.

In every anecdote I stumbled upon while in Austin, I could see the way these conflicts were ingested and personalized, how the riddles of navigating these environments (should you risk your job by resisting the mandate for AI adoption, or acquiesce and risk that the adoption will eventually cost your job or someone else’s?) were processed as dilemmas about mindset shifts or résumé positioning or investment strategy. The defining feature of the 2026 job market—even once one obtains employment—is the continuous management of these quandaries, the dissonance outsourced to your interiority where it can be negotiated with privately.

After about an hour of discussing these dynamics at a coffee shop3 before my flight home, my friend mentioned she’d been struggling with a recurring illness all year which she felt unable to fully purge. While she interpreted this as an entirely separate issue from what we had just spent the past two days unpacking in conversations across the city, another interpretation is that her mystery plague is the physical residue of the uncertainty and risk she’d been metabolizing for months. The spiritual experience of this precariousness doesn’t live around us as detached systemic critique, but inside us, as the immune system’s inability to fight off an infection or the pang of anxiety that strikes at 3 AM or a pit in the stomach that arrives every Sunday evening, a psychic weight borne by the only vessel where all of this data is stored and sorted: the body. That’s what usually goes unsaid in speculation about how AI will or will not change us: It already has.

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An Accidentally Insightful Profile of Lauren Sánchez Bezos

The viral Lauren Sánchez Bezos4 profile—the theme of which can best be described as wow, this chick has the audacity to be super-rich and openly, deliriously happy about it—slipped in an accidentally profound insight about the mythical Ordinary American’s relationship with the .01%. Most of the chatter I encountered about the piece was about how distasteful it is for “capitalism’s concubine” to be so unapologetically happy.

In Sánchez Bezos’s brazen joy, the “unspoken bargain” that once dictated the relationship between normal Americans and the “ultra-moneyed” has finally broken down into nakedly asymmetric honesty. That bargain was as follows: You could be unfathomably rich without people hassling you too much, so long as you did the legwork of (a) pretending not to be very rich, like Warren Buffett still owning his modest Omaha home, or (b) demonstrating a believable desire to give that money away, like Taylor Swift airdropping millions onto food banks at every tour stop.

This profile, in its attempt to humanize Sánchez Bezos as a deeply uncynical and fun-loving Mexican-American woman, inadvertently demonstrates that sometimes villainizing the .01% as dehumanized caricatures makes the reality of their humanity seem somehow exculpatory. It’s confusing and disorienting when interpersonal relationships with the richest people on the planet leave you feeling not disgusted, but charmed.

Emphasizing the unique badness (or goodness) of someone with immense power paradoxically works to undercut any structural analysis, because the plain truth of the matter is that if it weren’t them, it’d be someone else. These individuals are little more than placeholders, like those dinky blue and pink pegs in the Game of Life who (somewhat randomly, in the grand scheme of things) end up atop a mountain of plastic minivans.

If Bezos’s wealth is only corrosive as long as we believe he and his bride are uniquely bad, and that unique badness is why they shouldn’t have such disproportionate control of our collective future, then there’s an implied scenario in which their goodness could make it prosocial. This is why a profile that points out Lauren might be an otherwise likable gal feels threatening—but the personalities and intentions of the Bezii are immaterial. (New York Times)

• Ed Bastion, the CEO of Delta Air Lines, spoke candidly about Delta’s premium customers spending in ways that suggest total insulation from the pain caused by price hikes due to rising operating costs. “There’s two consumers out there. Fortunately at Delta, we’re focused on the premium consumer—those with pretty strong economic capability and capacity.” The metaphoric basic economy cabin, however, is “clearly struggling.” (Business Insider)

• How Big Law became a “white-collar sweatshop.” (Aeon)

• One in six American families is worth at least $1 million, per new Federal Reserve data. Today, a million dollars is worth approximately $480,000 in 1996 dollars, the year The Millionaire Next Door was published. I’d love for someone to rerun that analysis—is simply avoiding conspicuous consumption enough to make you rich?—with the modern labor market, housing prices, and education and medical debt load, and see if it holds up. I have a feeling the results would be very different. (Washington Post)

• So thankful for reporting like this that assures me I don’t need to waste any time researching which peptides I should buy to feel good.5 Still, this piece raises genuinely interesting questions about agency and bodily autonomy. (The New Yorker)

• Citrini Research, the firm that caused a $200 billion market meltdown after publishing a particularly harrowing AI doomsday scenario, decided to get their own boots on the ground in Iran. Incredibly, they dispatched an analyst to the Strait of Hormuz to “chat up tanker captains, ship crews, maritime brokers, local fishermen and smugglers, and business executives.” This sort of thing probably happens more than you’d expect, but sending a Wall Street suit into a war zone to gather intel for trading purposes is outrageous. (One number tossed out was that a 20% drawdown, or a “fall four times bigger than what we have already seen,” had not yet been priced in.) (Intelligencer)

• Robinhood—the “gamified investing” app of yore—was tapped as the brokerage firm partner for the forthcoming “Trump Accounts.” This choice is poetry. (Robinhood News)

• Last but not least, a real CNBC headline that positively tickled me. Let he who hath not made the classic Jesus-or-medical-professional mixup cast the first stone.

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